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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#161

Post by wkat4242 »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #123
jaredklewis wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Genuine question, what are some examples of companies in that "hiking the price" camp? I can think of tons of tech companies that sold or sell stuff at a loss for growth, but struggling to find examples where the companies then are able to turn dominant market s…

Uber is probably the biggest pure example. When I was in uni when they first spread, Uber's entire business model was flood the market with hilariously low prices and steep discounts. People overnight started using them like crazy. They were practically giving away their product. Now, they're as expensive, if not sometimes more expensive, than any other taxi or ridesharing service in my area. One thing I'll add is th…

Yeah I kinda wonder why people even use them anymore. I've long gone back to real taxis because their cheaper and I don't have to book them, I can just grab one on the street. Much more efficient than waiting for slowly watching my driver edge his way to me from 3 kilometers away.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#162

Post by jrockway »

wkat4242 wrote: post #157
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely wrong, the best AI will win. There is insane demand for better models.

The improvements seem to be leveling off already. GPT-4 isn't really worth the extra price to me. It's not that much better. What I would really want though is an uncensored LLM. OpenAI is basically unusable now, most of its replies are like "I'm only a dumb AI and my lawyers don't want me to answer your question". Yes I work in cyber. But it's pretty insane now.

I haven't played with the self-hosted LLMs at all yet, but back when Stable Diffusion was brand new I had a ton of fun creating images that lawyers wouldn't want you to create. ("Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump riding a battle elephant." It's just so much funnier with living people!) I imagine that Llama-2 and friends offer a similar experience.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#163

Post by leeeeeepw »

wkat4242 wrote: post #157
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely wrong, the best AI will win. There is insane demand for better models.

The improvements seem to be leveling off already. GPT-4 isn't really worth the extra price to me. It's not that much better. What I would really want though is an uncensored LLM. OpenAI is basically unusable now, most of its replies are like "I'm only a dumb AI and my lawyers don't want me to answer your question". Yes I work in cyber. But it's pretty insane now.

[dead]

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#164

Post by PaulHoule »

gbmatt wrote: post #154
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely wrong, the best AI will win. There is insane demand for better models.

Only Big Tech (Microsoft,Google,Facebook) can crawl the web at scale because they own the major content companies and they severly throttle the competition's crawlers, and sometimes outright block them. I'm not saying it's impossible to get around, but it is certainly very difficult, and you could be thrown in prison for violating the CFAA.

I'm not sure if training on a vast amount of content is really necessary in the sense that linguistic competence and knowledge can probably be separated to some extent. That is, the "ChatGPT" paradigm leads to systems that just confabulate and "makes shit up" and making something radically more accurate means going to something retrieval-based or knowledge graph-based.

In that case you might be able to get linguistic competence with a much smaller model that you end up training with a smaller, cleaner, and probably partially synthetic data set.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#165

Post by AndroTux »

charlesischuck wrote: post #109
joefourier wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's absolutely worth the money when you look at the whole picture.

That highly depends on many things. If you run a business with a relatively steady load that doesn't need to scale quickly multiple times per day, AWS is definitely not for you. Take Let's Encrypt[1] as an example. Just because cloud is the hype doesn't mean it's always worth it.

Edit: Or a personal experience: I had a customer that insisted on building their website on AWS. They weren't expecting high traffic loads and didn't need high availability, so I suggested to just use a VPS for $50 a month. They wanted to go the AWS route. Now their website is super scalable with all the cool buzzwords and it costs them $400 a month to run. Great! And in addition, the whole setup is way more complex to maintain since it's built on AWS instead of just a simple website with a database and some cache.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37536103

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#166

Post by jdminhbg »

strangemonad wrote: post #133
zarzavat wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI doesn’t own transformers, they didn’t even invent them. They just have the best one at this particular time. They have no moat. At some point, someone else will make a competitive model, if it’s Facebook then it might even be open source, and the industry will see price competition downwards .

This argument has always felt to me like saying “google has no moat in search, they just happen to currently have the best page rank. Nothing is stopping yahoo from creating a better one”

Google has a flywheel where its dominant position in search results in more users, whose data refines the search algorithm over time. The question is whether OpenAI has a similar thing going, or whether they just have done the best job of training a model against a static dataset so far. If they're able to incorporate customer usage to improve their models, that's a moat against competitors. If not, it's just a battle between groups of researchers and server farms to see who is best this week or next.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#167

Post by wkat4242 »

4death4 wrote: post #5
jonplackett wrote: post #3

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?

Probably all three: 1) They hiring too talent to make their models as efficient as possible. 2) They have a sweetheart deal with MS. 3) They’re better funded than everyone else and bringing in substantial revenue.

They basically are MS by now. Everyone at Microsoft I work with literally calls it an 'aquisition'. Even though they only own a share. It's pretty clear what their plans are.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#168

Post by smoldesu »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #114
freedomben wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stop excusing shitty work from trillion-dollar companies. It makes the world a worse place.

I think it's shitty and has no excuse, but the parent is right. Apple has no incentive to respond to their users since all roads lead to first-party Rome. It's why stuff like the Digital Market Act is more needed than some people claim.

You know what would get Apple to fix this? Forced competition. You know what Apple spends their trillions preventing?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#169

Post by filterfiber »

blackoil wrote: post #107
filterfiber wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Does anyone suck at that?

Does android even have native OCR? Last I checked everything required an OCR app of varying quality (including windows/linux).

On ios/macos you can literally just click on a picture and select the text in it as if it wasn't a picture. I know for sure on iOS you don't even open an app to do it, just any picture you can select it.

Last I checked the Opensource OCR tools were decent but behind the closed source stuff as well.

Random google result of OCR on android (could be outdated) - https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/10te5et/why_oc...

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#170

Post by jdminhbg »

wkat4242 wrote: post #161
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is probably the biggest pure example. When I was in uni when they first spread, Uber's entire business model was flood the market with hilariously low prices and steep discounts. People overnight started using them like crazy. They were practically giving away their product. Now, they're as expensive, if not sometimes more expensive, than any other taxi or ridesharing service in my area. One thing I'll add is th…

Yeah I kinda wonder why people even use them anymore. I've long gone back to real taxis because their cheaper and I don't have to book them, I can just grab one on the street. Much more efficient than waiting for slowly watching my driver edge his way to me from 3 kilometers away.

The number of places where you can reliably walk out onto the street and hail a taxi is pretty small. Everywhere else, the relevant decision is whether calling a dispatcher or using a taxi company's app is faster/cheaper/more reliable than Uber/Lyft.
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