OpenAI is too cheap to beat • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#181

Post by pests » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #170

wkat4242 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Living in the Detroit Metro area seeing that interaction in movies always blew my mind. Just walk outside and get a taxi? Crazy talk.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#182

Post by shrubble » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #113

shrubble wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. A full rack with 16 amps usable power and some bandwidth is $400/month in Kansas City, MO. That is enough to power 5x A100s 24x7, so 10k plus $80 per month each, amortized, of course many more A100s would drop the price. Once installed in the rack ($250 1 time cost) you shouldn't need to touch it. So 10k plus $1250 per A100, per year including power. You can put 2 or 3 A100s per cheapo Celeron based CPU w…

Did you also include the network required to make the A100s talk to each other? Both the datacenter network (so the CPUs can load data) and the fabric (so the A100s can talk?) You also left out the data tech costs- probably at least $50K/individual-year in KC (although I guess I'd just work for free ribs). If you're putting A100s into celeron motherboards... I don't know what to say. You're not saving money by puttin…

You are correct that I left out the fabric which needs to be added in. Again a one time expense, though there are different ways to hook it up, it seems, and if the model fits on one system you may not need it.

You hire people who are employed by the DC, by the hour for DC work. How much work is there to do once it is screwed into the rack?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#183

Post by sberens » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

appplication wrote: post #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 d…

> They are ... as likely to be the next MySpace as they are Facebook.

I will happily take a 1:1 bet on them not going the way of MySpace in, say, 5 years!

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#184

Post by matteoraso » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #16

I just paid the $20 for a month to try it out. In my super limited experience, GPT-4 is actually impressive and worth the money.

Unless you're an extremely heavy user, it's cheaper to just use the API. I've been tempted to do that, but OpenAI doesn't have a free trial for me to see the quality of GPT-4 first.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#185

Post by outlace » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

appplication wrote: post #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 d…

But OpenAI appears to have some sort of data moat. I doubt their model is the best in the world, but more/better data generally beats better model, and GPT-4 definitely beats Claude, Bard, Bernie and the rest probably because they curated the best quality and largest data set. Maybe that moat doesn't last long but perhaps they have exclusive rights to some of that dataset through commercial agreements that could be a more durable moat.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#186

Post by latchkey » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

matteoraso wrote: post #184

latchkey wrote: post #16

I just paid the $20 for a month to try it out. In my super limited experience, GPT-4 is actually impressive and worth the money.

Unless you're an extremely heavy user, it's cheaper to just use the API. I've been tempted to do that, but OpenAI doesn't have a free trial for me to see the quality of GPT-4 first.

$20/mo... ~$1.3 day. I'm good with "vastly cheaper than a latte" pricing model and $20 to try something out for a month isn't bad at all.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#187

Post by shaburn » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #126

shaburn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Uber/AirBnB/Wework all have physical base units with ascending costs due to inflation and theoretical economies of scale. AI models have some GPU constraints but could easily reach a state where the cost to opperate falls and becomes relatively trivial with almost no lowerbound, for most use cases. You are correct there is a race for marketshare. The crux in this case will be keeping it. Easy come, easy go. Mode…

Probably why Altman has been talking so much about how dangerous it is and how regulations are needed. No natural moat, so building a regulatory one.

Only hundreds of billions at stake if successful.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#188

Post by singingfish » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:14 PM UTC

These LLMs are confabulation machines. They're as good as the knowledge of the person who is driving the current session. For coding problems this makes them like a very good teddy bear debugger, but do not expect independently produced creative work from them.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#189

Post by tomrod » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

adam_arthur wrote: post #179

appplication wrote: post #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 d…

The winner is going to be the consumers of AI. It's a race to the bottom on pricing on the provider/infra side. It seems very unlikely that any single LLM provider will achieve a sustained and durable advantage enough to achieve large margins on their product. Consumers can swap between providers with relative ease, and there is very little stickiness to these LLM APIs, since the interfaces are general and operate on…

Aye, open models from Meta are tearing at the moat.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#190

Post by jongjong » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 9:18 PM UTC

The main flaw I see in the argument is that assumes that AIs should be generalists... But if you look at the reality of our current human economy, you will notice that generalists cannot even get jobs; the economy needs specialists. I think the same will happen with AI; companies will need specialist AIs, not generalists.

And since there are many different industries/specializations with a lot of nuanced, undocumented knowledge which is not available online, it will be difficult for a single large company to acquire all that specialist information. I think the bottleneck isn't going to be hardware costs, but merely putting together the optimal training data. To do this, you need to find the top experts in the world in any given field.

Unfortunately, it's difficult to do right now because top experts are often not given credit these days. Those who are promoted as the top people in any given field are often mostly good at politics and lack the deep nuanced knowledge that would be required to produce top quality training data.