Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Hacker News Board

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

#631

Post by cubefox » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:10 PM UTC

chefandy wrote: post #315

hospitalJail wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Midjourney is more popular (from what I'm seeing) than Stable Diffusion at the moment because it's better at the moment. Midjourney is closed-source. Midjourney is easier, its not better. The low barrier to entry has it popular, but it isnt as realistic, doesnt follow the prompt as well, and has almost no customization. SD is the holy grail of AI art, if you can afford a computer or server to run SD + have the abili…

That seems to depend on your use case. Frankly, I don't have much use for either of them but Midjourney was much closer. I've twice spent a couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to generate a simple background image that would be blurred out when rendering 3D models. SD out-of-the-box was far worse, but Midjourney still was not up to the task. It's incredible how well they can generate images of nearly any subject/ob…

Classical professional tools like Photoshop have a lot less potential though. They are very precise, but (I assume) they have barely advanced in the past decade. Tools based on generative AI will probably improve massively over the next few years. Most such tools seem currently based on Stable Diffusion, and apparently OpenAI/Midjourney/Google have zero interest in supporting such tools. But this could change soon, e.g. when Adobe tries to compete with the SD ecosystem.

We already now see deepfakes (e.g. of Trump or the Pope, recently even videos) that a far beyond what we saw in the years before, indicating that the old professional tools weren't so powerful after all. Now if we extrapolate this a few years into the future...

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

#632

Post by acdha » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:17 PM UTC

mattferderer wrote: post #451

irrational wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same can be said about the results that pop up on your favorite search engine or asking other people questions. If anything advances in AI & search tech will do a better job at providing citations that agree & disagree with the results given. But this can be a turtles all the way down problem.

There’s a real difference in scale and perceived authority: false search results already cause problems but many people have also been learning not to blindly trust the first hit and to check things like the site hosting it.

That’s not perfect but I think it’s a lot better than building things into Word will be. There’s almost no chance that people won’t trust suggestions there more than random web searches and the quality of the writing will make people more inclined to think it’s authoritative.

Consider what happened earlier this year when professor Tyler Cowen wrote an entire blog post on a fake citation. He certainly knows better but it’s so convenient to use the LLM emission rather than do more research…

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/internet-archive-p...

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

#633

Post by acdha » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:21 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #551

TeMPOraL wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I can't see Google failing here. Like other tech giants, they're sitting on a ridiculously large war chest. Worst case, they can wait for the space to settle a bit and spend a few billion to buy the market leader. If AI really is an existential threat to their business prospects, spending their reserves on this is a no-brainer.

They won't fail, they'll just provide compute infrastructure for people building AI products. Google is mostly bad at building products these days.

GCP is a product, too, but it’s not as good as either of the top two, that’s a low margin market, and a key theme in this article is that people have made model tuning less expensive.

There’s no path forward for Google which doesn’t involve firing a lot of managers and replacing them with people who think their income depends on being a lot better at building and especially maintaining products.

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

#634

Post by IceHegel » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:27 PM UTC

balls187 wrote: post #244

My feeling on this is “f** yeah, and f** you [google et al]” How much computing innovation was pioneered by community enthusiasts and hobbyists that have been leveraged by these huge companies. I know meta, googlr, msft et al give back in way of opensource, but it really pales in comparison to the value those companies have extracted. I’m a huge believer in generative AI democratizing tech. Certainly I’m glad to pay…

Agreed, having 5 monopolies extract all the value from computing and then slowly merge with the state is not a developmental stage we want to prolong.

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

#635

Post by IceHegel » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:30 PM UTC

Garcia98 wrote: post #316

The author is overly optimistic with the current state of open source LLMs, (e.g., Koala is very far away from matching ChatGPT performance). However, I agree with their spirit, Google has been one of the most important contributors to the development of LLMs and until recently they've been open sharing their model weights under permissive licenses, they should not backtrack to closed source. OpenAI has a huge lead i…

The counter argument, which I’m not sure I agree with but it has to be said, is that OpenAI benefits from Google’s open source work. So staying permissive might widen the gap further.

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

#636

Post by isp » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:33 PM UTC

greenfield1 wrote: post #619

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…

The thing you have in your pocket would have meant an enormous investment for equivalent compute power just decades ago and filled a whole basement with server racks.

The legendary Cray-2 was the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1985, with peak 1.9 GFLOPS. Less than four decades ago.

By comparison, the Cray is outperformed by my smartphone.

Actually, it is outperformed by my previous smartphone, which I purchased in 2016 and replaced in 2018.

Actually, it is outperformed by a single core on my previous smartphone, of which it has eight cores.

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

#637

Post by zirgs » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:38 PM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #139

visarga wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying the same things for weeks, right here and in the usual places. Basically - OpenAI will not be able to continue to commercialise chatGPT-3.5, they will have to move to GPT-4 because the open source alternatives will catch up. Their island of exclusivity is shrinking fast. In a few months nobody will want to pay for GPT-4 either when they can have private, cheap equivalents. So GPT-5 it is for OpenAI.…

> I've been saying the same things for weeks, right here and in the usual places. Basically - OpenAI will not be able to continue to commercialise chatGPT-3.5, they will have to move to GPT-4 because the open source alternatives will catch up. Their island of exclusivity is shrinking fast. In a few months nobody will want to pay for GPT-4 either when they can have private, cheap equivalents. So GPT-5 it is for OpenAI…

You can't train ChatGPT with your own data and it has the infamous "As a language model..." problem. This is why an alternative that can be run locally is a better option for many people.

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

#638

Post by IceHegel » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:39 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #59

"Many of the new ideas are from ordinary people." Yeah. Google can fuck right off. Maybe this attitude is what got them in the weeds in the first place.

I don’t think trying to be the hall monitor of humanity has been good for google. The more paternalistic, the less innovative.

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

#639

Post by osigurdson » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:42 PM UTC

The true vendor lock-in in this space is embeddings. Once you have generated embeddings for all of your content it will be very difficult to move to another vendor's embedding engine as there will be no way to translate from one to the other.

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

#640

Post by IceHegel » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:43 PM UTC

aresant wrote: post #43

"People will not pay for a restricted model when free, unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality. . ." I'll take the opposite side of that bet - MSFT / Goog / etc in the providers side will drive record revenues on the back of closed / restricted models: 1 - Table stakes for buying software at enterprise level is permissions based management & standardized security / hardening. 2 - The corporate world is al…

I agree with this over the next 10 years but disagree over the next 30.

When/If the innovation slows down, the open source stuff will be able to out compete commercial options. Something like this timeline played out for databases and operating systems.