Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI is too cheap to beat

generatingconversation.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 426 posts

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#201

Post by sangnoir »

outlace wrote: post #185
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…

> But OpenAI appears to have some sort of data moat.

I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that Google and Facebook have at least one, possibly 2 or more orders of magnitude more latent training data to work with - not including Googles search index.

My uninformed opinion is that Google and Meta's ML efforts are fragmented - with lots of serious effort going into increasing existing revenue streams with LLMs and the like being treated as a hobby or R&D projects. OpenAI is putting all its effort into a handful of projects that go into a product they sell. The dynamic and headcounts will change if the LLM market grows into billions

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#202

Post by freedomben »

smoldesu wrote: post #168
CamperBob2 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

agreed. I'm not trying to "excuse" shitty work, merely observing the incentives/pressures on them. We can complain about it all we want, but we won't understand it until we understand the incentives.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#203

Post by ra7 »

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's moat in search has always been systems and data center infrastructure. You can create your own search ranking algorithm, but you can't crawl the web and serve search results to billions of worldwide users in a few milliseconds.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#204

Post by freedomben »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #98
freedomben wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local AI will never be as capable as AI running in massive GPU datacenters I'm not sure this is true, even in the short term. For some things yes, that's definitely true. But for other things that are real-time or near real-time where network latency would be unacceptable, we're already there. For example, Google's Pixel 8 launch includes real-time audio processing/enhancing which is made possible by their new Tens…

> But for other things that are real-time or near real-time where network latency would be unacceptable, we're already there. Agreed. Something else I wonder is if local AI in mobile devices might be better able to learn from its real-time interactions with the physical world than datacenter-based AI. It's walking around in the world with a human with all its various sensors recording in real-time (unless disabled) -…

This is a fascinating thought! It could send all the data to the cloud, but all those sensors going all the time would be a lot of constant data to send, and would use a lot of mobile data which would be unacceptable to many people (including probably the mobile networks). If it's running locally though, the data could we quickly analyzed and probably deleted, avoiding long term storage issues. There's got to be a lot of interesting things you could do with that kind of data

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#205

Post by ewoodrich »

filterfiber wrote: post #169
blackoil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 behin…

Not sure about other Android OEMs but OCR has been built in to Samsung Gallery (equivalent to Photos app on iPhones) for a while. Works the same way - long press on text in an image to select it as text. Haven't had any issues with it.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#206

Post by pptr »

filterfiber wrote: post #169
blackoil wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 behin…

I use Google Lens for OCR in photos and the swipe-up+"select" feature for OCR in arbitrary apps/websites.

That at least works for Pixel phones. Not sure about Samsung and others.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#207

Post by KaiserPro »

kevlened wrote: post #108
nine_k wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the policy says that, but there is no external verification or auditing.

So its hard to trust.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#208

Post by idonotknowwhy »

sbierwagen wrote: post #175
PaulHoule wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how you define quality. This paper reflects my own experience https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08377 and shows how LLM technology has a lot more to offer than "ChatGPT". The real takeaway is that by training LLMs with real training data (even with a "less powerful" model) you can get an error rate more than 10x less than you get with the "zero shot" model of asking ChatGPT to answer a question for you the same way…

> Remember that Moore's Law is over in the sense that transistors are not getting cheaper generation after generation, that is why the NVIDIA 40xx series is such a disappointment to most people. I am unconvinced by the idea of trying to redefine Moore's Law to be about MSRP. The NVIDIA H100 has twice the FLOPS of the A100 on a smaller die. That's Moore's Law, full stop. When NVIDIA has useful competition in the AI sp…

Agreed. We need Intel to get the software side of ARC together. Or we need something like the unified ram or apple silicon. Apple have accidental stumbled into being the most competitive way to run llms with their 192gb studio.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#209

Post by KaiserPro »

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?

> Or are they just operating at a massive loss to kill off other competition?

Bingo.

> the deal with Microsoft for cloud services making it cheap?

It should make it cheaper, but it takes time and engineers to migrate work load from AWS (which is reasonably adept at scaling) to azure, which is not.

I think they run k8s in something like 4k groups of nodes, which is spectacular, because k8s isn't really designed to do that. Running it at that scale is challenging because the traffic required to coordinate is massive (well it was last time I looked into it.)

Post reply on HN