Earlier quoted context omitted.
Altman’s push for regulatory capture makes so much sense given how fast this field is going. Open models you can run on regular hardware are still behind GPT-4 by some distance but they are closing in at a rate that leads me to believe there’s not much of a moat there. There’s also a ton of promising work on quantization and pruning and other acceleration and compression techniques to make more powerful models run on…
>Open models... are still behind GPT-4 by some distance but they are closing in at a rate that leads me to believe there’s not much of a moat there Commercially, this doesn't matter even if true. As I keep reminding here: moats are rarely about raw tech. Moats are much more about integrations, brand ("Nobody got fired for buying X"), access to API/raw compute... If OpenAI have a superior Office 365 integration they'l…
It's hardly comparable to the gigantic ecosystem of services and micro-services that your comparison alludes to with IBM and Microsoft. OpenAI is nowhere near such a brand recognition, and grassroots support for it within a company would quickly move to the next free chatgpt-clone that is better or cheaper or faster or more accessible just as what happened with Dalle-2.
The value of the models themselves will quickly come down to just a slight bit over the underlying hardware costs and Altman knows this.
Microsoft bought themselves a $10B time window to try to do what you're saying, so let's see :) But even for them, when they've built LLM-adaptations to their most popular products, it's fairly simple to just swap it out with something new and more shiny and cheaper that's not OpenAI, and the end customer won't notice as it's the Microsoft or Office brand that they buy into. They are not going to advertise what's inside their products with big banners "Powered by OpenAI" in the long run, I think (do they now?)