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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a smartphone, /corrected. It's a recent announcement: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/28/technology/openai-apple-s...

It's not a really a phone. they mention ambient computing.

Oh, smart device then.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday, while driving: "Read last message." Siri: "Sorry. Dictation service is unavailable at the moment." It's past time for excuses. High-level people at Apple need to be fired over this. Hello? Tim? Do your job. Hello? Anybody home...?

Nobody is switching away from Apple over this, so ultimately Tim is doing his job. Under his watch Apple has become the defacto choice for entire generations. Between vendor-lockin/walled gardens and societal/cultural pressures (don't want to be a green bubble!), they have one of the stickiest user bases there are.

True, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t complain.

My hope is that the upcoming eu rulings allow competition here. Ie force Apple to get out of the way of making their hardware better with better software.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#103

I think this is under appreciated. I run a "talk-to-your-files" website with 5ish K MRR and a pretty generous free tier. My OpenAI costs have not exceeded $200 / mo. People talk about using smaller, cheaper models but unless you have strong data security requirements you're burdening yourself with serious maintenance work and using objectively worse models to save pennies. This doesn't even consider OpenAI continuous…

The bleeding obvious is that OpenAI is doing what most tech companies for the last 20 years have done. Offer the product for dirt cheap to kill off competition, then extract as much value from your users as possible by either mining data or hiking the price.

I don’t understand how people are surprised by this anymore.

So yeah, it’s the best option right now, when the company is burning through cash, but they’re planning on getting that money back from you eventually.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#104

Is this a reflection of OpenAI’s massive scale making it so cheap for them? Or is it the deal with Microsoft for cloud services making it cheap? Or are they just operating at a massive loss to kill off other competition? Or something else?

I think it's mostly the scale. Once you have a consistent user base and tons of GPUs, batching inference/training across your cluster allows you to process requests much faster and for a lower marginal cost.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#106
The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature differentiated because at best even cutting edge features are only 6-12 months ahead of competition cloning or beating.

This is Uber/AirBnB/Wework/literally every VC subsidized hungry-hungry-hippos market grab all over again. If you’re falling in love because the prices are so low, that is ephemeral at best and is not a moat. Someone try calling an Uber in SF today and tell me how much that costs you and how much worse the experience is vs 2017.

OpenAI is the undisputed future of AI… for timescales 6 months and less. They are still extremely vulnerable to complete disruption and as likely to be the next MySpace as they are Facebook.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#107
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you taking the confidence that Apple will be able to catch up to OpenAI’s GPT? “Apple's built-in AI capabilities” are very weak so far.

Not OP, In my experience apple's ML on iphones is seamless. Tap and hold on your dog in a picture and it'll cut out the background, your photos are all sorted automatically including by person (and I think by pet). OCR is seamless - you just select text in images as if it was real text. I totally understand these aren't comparable to LLMs - rumor has it apple is working on an llm - if their execution is anything like…

>OCR is seamless

Wasn't that solved about a decade ago. Does anyone suck at that?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#108
post #64
post #45

Yep. Building a project that needs some LLMs. I'm very much of the self-hosting mindset so will try DIY, but it's very obviously the wrong choice by any reasonable metric. OpenAI will murder my solution by quality, by availability, by reliability and by scalability...all for the price of a coffee. It's a personal project though & partly intended for learning purposes so there is scope for accepting trainwreck level t…

One small caveat: OpenAI gets to see all your prompts, and all the responses. Sometimes this can be unacceptable. Law,, medicine, finance, all of them would prefer a self-hosted, private GPT.

Their data retention policy on their APIs is 30 days, and it's not used for training [0]. In addition, qualifying use cases (likely the ones you mentioned) qualify for zero data retention for most endpoints.

[0] - https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/how-we-use-your-data

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#109

I’m confused don’t a100s cost 10,000 to buy? Why would you pay 166k per year to rent?

AWS is extremely overpriced for nearly every service. I don’t know why anyone else outside of startups with VC money to burn or bigcos that need the “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” guarantee would use them. You’re better off with Lambdalabs or others which charge only $1.1/h per A100. Also that is a 8xA100 system as others have noted, but it is the 40GB one which can be found on eBay for as low as $3k if you g…

You pay for the system not the gpu with AWS.

It's absolutely worth the money when you look at the whole picture. Also lambda labs never has availability. I actually can schedule a distributed cluster on AWS.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#110

I’m confused don’t a100s cost 10,000 to buy? Why would you pay 166k per year to rent?

A top end gpu now to make you competitive cost 20-50k per gpu.

To train a top model you need hundreds of them in a very advanced datacenter.

You can't just plug gpus into standard systems and train, everything is custom.

The technical talent required for these systems is rare to say the least. The technical talent to make a model is also rare.

I trained a few foundation models with images, and I would NEVER buy any of them. These guys are on a wildly different scale than basically everyone.

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