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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”

#621

Post by Closi »

airstrike wrote: post #400
narrator wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Time for a dedicated "AI box" at home with hotswapping compute boards? Maybe put it inside a humanoid or animal-like robot with TTS capabilities? Sign me up for that kickstarter! EDIT: based on some quick googling (should I have asked ChatGPT instead?), Nvidia sells the Jetson Xavier Nx dev kit for ~$610 https://www.electromaker.io/shop/product/nvidia-jetson-xavie... Just need the robot toy dog enclosure (See https:/…

It's more likely that you want a lot of compute for a very little amount of time each day - which makes centralised/cloud processing the most obvious answer.

If I want a response within 100ms, and have 1000 AI-queries per day, that would only be about 2 minutes of aggregated processing time for your AI box per day. It's less than 1% utilised. If the same box is multiuser and on the internet, it can probably serve 50-100 peoples queries concurrently.

The converse is that if you put something onto the cloud, for the same cost you might be able to effectively get 50x the hardware per user for the same cost (i.e. rather than have 1 AI box locally with 1 GPU for each of the 50 users, you could have 1 AI box with 50 GPU's which is usable by all 50 users).

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

#622

Post by BiteCode_dev »

Investors are obsessed with moats, but people have to realize that the entire world runs on business that have no moats.

There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant...

The moat concept is predominant because the idea that everything must make billions have infected the debate about businesses.

It's all about being a unicorn, a giant, a monopoly, making every body at the top billionaires, and it's like there is no other way to live.

Except that's not how most people do live, even entrepreneurs.

Even Apple, which today is the typical example of a business with a moat, didn't start with "we can't get into this computer business, we'd have no moat".

They have a moat now, but it's a consequence of all the business decisions and the thing they built after many decades.

They didn't start their project by the moat. The started their project by providing value and marketing it.

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

#623

Post by davidguetta »

Levitz wrote: post #457
davidguetta wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be the Open Source who is the real winner overall.. After OpenAI became basically ClosedAI it's an excellent news

I'm not sure? Placing ethics constraints on a company under a capitalist system is hard. Placing them on open source is impossible.

I have real troubles taking with "AI" ethics when the biggest danger seems to be offending people at a mass scale... Sounds like a win as well

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

#625

Post by Hydraulix989 »

midasuni wrote: post #610
safety1st wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no guarantees about who will or won't own the future, just the observation that disruptive technology makes everyone's fate more volatile. Big tech companies like Google have a lot of in-built advantages, but they're notoriously bad at executing on pivots which fundamentally alter or commoditize their core business. If that wasn't true we'd all be using Microsoft phones (or heck, IBM PCs AND phones). In Goo…

From memory Bill Gates barely mentioned the internet in his first edition of road ahead in early 95. By late 95 the second edition entire book was revolving around the internet as if he had an epiphany.

In the first edition, he did describe something very much like the Internet, except he called it the "Information Superhighway"

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

#626

Post by nashashmi »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #622

Investors are obsessed with moats, but people have to realize that the entire world runs on business that have no moats. There are no moats to being a plumber, a baker, a restaurant... The moat concept is predominant because the idea that everything must make billions have infected the debate about businesses. It's all about being a unicorn, a giant, a monopoly, making every body at the top billionaires, and it's lik…

Shareholders gain pennies with moats, pennies that someone else does not earn. Without moats they benefit much more, but it's not more than someone else. And that's the contentious issue. How would I benefit more than my neighbor?

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

#627

Post by zirgs »

mesh wrote: post #469
tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

>The point I'm wanting to make is that users will go to whoever has the best model. Best isn't defined just by quality though. In some instances for some groups, things like whether the model is trained on licensed content (with permission) and / or is safe for commercial use is more important. This is one reason why Adobe's Firefly has been received relatively well. (I work for Adobe).

Adobe Firefly can't be run locally and Adobe knows everything that their users generate. I can't train my own LoRAs or checkpoints. Adobe also has proven that they can't keep the data of their users secure. Which is why it's better to use something else.

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

#628

Post by p1esk »

spyckie2 wrote: post #545
reissbaker wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 is so much better for complex tasks that I wouldn't use anything else. Trying to get 3.5 to do anything complicated is like pulling teeth, and using something worse than 3.5... Oof. TBH this feels like cope from Google; Bard is embarrassingly bad and they expected to be able to compete with OpenAI. In my experience, despite their graph in the article that puts them ahead of Vicuna-13B, they're actually behind..…

The question is how long will it take for open source to become just as good as GPT 4? If it is 3 years, then yes, this is copium. But if it is 1 year or less, then how much is google really missing out on? OpenAI spent 600m to improve GPT and made 200m from it and if costs dramatically fall for model development, it might be OpenAI that is shooting itself in the foot.

OpenAI spent 600m to improve GPT and made 200m from it

How do you know?

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

#629

Post by bionhoward »

zmmmmm wrote: post #493

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…

Version 4 also now supports 32k tokens, good luck handling that on even awesome gaming local dev rig machines, although perhaps with linformer ideas, block-wise algorithms to handle larger than GPU memory, universal memory / RDMA it’s entirely doable. I got 50,000 atoms simulation back in 2018 on 11gb vram, at 32bit floats, the software stack has come a long way and now we have the 24gb 4090 with bfloat16, and vector DBs, and the infinite-context transformer paper just came out, so models all ought to be retrained on that if the method is truly superior anyway, not sure how atoms translate to pages of text but it’s almost surely possible to make a pretty useful LLM.

Although, OpenAI has a massive moat named “data”

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

#630

Post by bionhoward »

keenon wrote: post #581

This is so indicative of Google culture missing the point. The idea of spending $10M training a single model is treated as a casual reality. But “tHaNk GoOdNeSs those generous open source people published their HiGh QuAlItY datasets of ten thousand examples each. Otherwise we’d have no way of creating datasets like that…” :| the sustainable competitive advantage has been and will continue to be HUGE PROPRIETARY DATAS…

One way to push back on the data argument is to consider the progress DeepMind made with self play. Perhaps Bard can self-dialogue and achieve superhuman results. I won’t be surprised. Plus the underlying architecture is dense. Sparse transformers are a major upgrade. That’s only one of many upgrades you can make. There is still a lot of headroom and IMHO GPT-4 already implements AGI if you give it the right context
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