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Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

semianalysis.com

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Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#491

Post by heliophobicdude »

irrational wrote: post #446
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

It being everywhere worries me a lot. It outputs a lot of false information and the typical person doesn’t have the time or inclination to vet the output. Maybe this is a problem that will be solved. I’m not optimistic on that front.

I think this is a failure in how we fine-tuned and evaluated them in RLHF.

"In theory, the human labeler can include all the context they know with each prompt to teach the model to use only the existing knowledge. However, this is impossible in practice." [1] Therefore causing and forcing some connections that are not all there for the LLM. Extrapolate that across various subjects and types of queries and there you go.

1:https://huyenchip.com/2023/05/02/rlhf.html

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#492

Post by asdfman123 »

dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

It already is built seamlessly into a lot of Google products.

OpenAI just beat Google to the cool chatbot demo.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#493

Post by zmmmmm »

I'm a bit sceptical of the "no moat" proposition because (a) ChatGPT 4.0 really does seem in a different league and (b) it's clearly very hard to run. I haven't seen anything from the explosion of open source / community efforts that comes close for general applications.

The take in the post rings of the classic trademark Google arrogance where they assume that if somebody else can do it they can do it better if they just try - where the challenge of "just trying" is discounted to zero. In reality, "Just trying" is massively important and sometimes all that is important. The gap between unrefined model output and the level of polish and refinement that is apparent with ChatGPT 4 may appear technically small but it's the whole difference between a widely applicable and usable product and something that can't be more than a toy. I'm not sure Google has it in it any more to really fight for something they want to achieve that level of polish.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#495

Post by YetAnotherNick »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #477
arnavsahu336 wrote: post #473

The only moat in technology are the founders and team. I think this concept of having a moat sounds great when VCs write investment memos - but in reality, cold, hard execution everyday is what matters and that all comes from the quality and tenacity of the team. Every piece of application software is a wrapper on other software with a set of opinionated workflows built on top. Yes, there are some companies that made…

The concept of a moat for facebook (via network effects) and google (via scale, habits and learning effects) has worked well when it comes to printing cash. Moats don't last forever, doesn't mean they aren't real. The guy writing the post was writing about AI research at google. Not generally at Google, or for search.

> via scale, habits and learning effects

Then OpenAI/Google still has the moat for LLMs, for being most reliable, updated and trustworthy.

Facebook example made sense in pre short video era where connections meant something personal.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#496

Post by ArlenBales »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #460
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

OpenAI=Microsoft for all intents and purposes. Microsoft has a stake in OpenAI and has integrated into Azure, Bing and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft will probably eventually integrate it into their Xbox services, and possibly games via their own first-party studios.

In my opinion Microsoft has equal or more reach/subsidy advantage than Google for AI, at least toward general consumers.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#497

Post by zmmmmm »

Animats wrote: post #298
skybrian wrote: post #195

This gets attention due to being a leak, but it’s still just one Googler’s opinion and it has signs of being overstated for rhetorical effect. In particular, demos aren’t the same as products. Running a demo on one person’s phone is an important milestone, but if the device overheats and/or gets throttled then it’s not really something you’d want to run on your phone. It’s easy to claim that a problem is “solved” wit…

It comes across as something from an open source enthusiast outside Google. Note the complete lack of references to monetization. Also, there's no sense of how this fits with other Google products. Given a chat engine, what do you do with it? Integrate it with search? With Gmail? With Google Docs? LLMs by themselves are fun, but their use will be as components of larger systems.

Inside or out, it sounds like someone with an agenda to convince Google to release its model in the wild. I feel that all the more so because it is never stated explicitly but it's the obvious conclusion from reading between the lines. Things like hinting that Meta is a huge winner from LLaMa getting released (this isn't obvious to me at all).

The pitch being that if Google makes its models public it can race back to the forefront of "owning" the AI space and then capture the value of owning the underlying platform, like Android and Chrome.

The kind of scenario I imagine is that this is an insider who wants out but a huge amount of their work / investment / value is tied up with models they can't take with them.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#498

Post by heliophobicdude »

bhl wrote: post #429
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

> It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like Agreed but I don’t think the products that’ll gain market share from this wave of AI will be legacy web 2 apps; rather it’ll be AI-native or first apps that are build from ground up to collect…

You bottled up exactly my disappointment with some large companies' legacy AI offerings. They don't do both: iterate off of telemetry data and fulfill user's needs.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#499

Post by deegles »

narrator wrote: post #396
dahwolf wrote: post #389

The current paradigm is that AI is a destination. A product you go to and interact with. That's not at all how the masses are going to interact with AI in the near future. It's going to be seamlessly integrated into every-day software. In Office/Google docs, at the operating system level (Android), in your graphics editor (Adobe), on major web platforms: search, image search, Youtube, the like. Since Google and other…

I think the problem with AI being everywhere and ubiquitous is that AI is the first technology in a very long time that requires non-trivial compute power. That compute power costs money. This is why you only get a limited number of messages every few hours from GPT4. It simply costs too much to be a ubiquitous technology. For example, the biggest LLama model only runs on an A100 that costs about $15,000 on ebay. The…

I was in Japan recently and they sell these pocket size translator devices with a microphone, camera and screen. You can speak to it or take pictures and it will translate on the fly. Maybe $100 usd range for a nice one.

It's only a matter of time before someone makes a similar device with a decent LLM on it, and premium ones will have more memory/cpu power.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#500

Post by bbor »

ngngngng wrote: post #348
sdenton4 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just gotta get to the point where we can just ask the model to code the wrapper we want to use it with...

Any wrapper that needs writing speaks to a gap in the AI's current capabilities. I just don't see why or how I would put man-hours into trying to close that gap when a future model could eclipse my work at any time.

The problem is that I can't think of a reason not to apply this same concern to basically all knowledge work -- once it can code new wrappers, it'll probably also be obsoleting huge swathes of other skillsets. And given current models, that really doesn't seem that far off. Personally it kinda feels like working at a company with impending layoffs...

But somehow my landlord isn't taking that as an excuse to stop working?? B.S.

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