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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#211

Post by Bukhmanizer »

jaredklewis wrote: post #116
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plann…

> 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…

I was most thinking of Uber and AirBnB for price hiking and Google and Facebook for extracting value.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#212

Post by zaptrem »

PaulHoule wrote: post #160
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

In addition to what the other commenter said about Moores law, innovations like Flash Attention which reduced memory usage by over 10x and FA 2 which made huge leaps in compute efficiency show there is still a lot of room to improve the models and inference algorithms themselves. Even without compute we likely haven’t scratched the surface of efficient transformers.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#213

Post by talent_deprived »

roofio wrote: post #51
talent_deprived wrote: post #42

[flagged]

"iamverysmart" comment. Failing to embrace it will leave you behind. Consultants that use OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model are “significantly more productive and produced significantly higher quality results” than those who do not, according to a new study from the Harvard Business School: https://aibusiness.com/nlp/harvard-study-gpt-4-boosts-work-q...

You misconstrue, I'm not failing to embrace it, I am a conscientious objector.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#214

Post by paulddraper »

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…

> Someone try calling an Uber in SF today and tell me how much that costs you

Yet...what is the biggest U.S. ride share app?

Hungry Hippos is true. But it also works.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#215

Post by phillipcarter »

toddmorey wrote: post #132
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…

Just heard Steve today from Builder.io who did an impressive launch of Figma -> code powered by AI. They trained a custom model for this. Better accuracy, sure, but I was a little surprised to watch how much faster it is than GPT4. Based on their testing, they’ve become believers in domain specific smaller models, especially for performance.

Codegen is an area that seems to have the best breakout performance compared to the big FMs. In hindsight it should be obvious given that openai created Codex.

However, I am skeptical that smaller and more focused models will do well for more general tasks. I’ve found gpt-4 to just be flatly excellent for tasks that involve emitting a custom DSL and customer-provided business context (the latter being something we cannot train for, not without immense expense).

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#216

Post by Bukhmanizer »

zarzavat wrote: post #129
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 plann…

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 .

I agree and what you say isn’t incompatible with what I said. But the point of the OP is “why even bother using other models/open source models when OpenAI is cheaper”? Well take away the competition and see what happens.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#217

Post by saminaustin »

sarchertech wrote: post #25
SkyMarshal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the first two, plus first-mover brand recognition. Millions of $20 monthly subs for GPT4 add up. They might also be operating at a loss afaik, but I suspect they're one of the few that can break even just based on scale, brand recognition, and economics.

I haven’t heard any evidence that they have millions of Plus subscribers. I’ve seen 100 to 200 million active users, but nothing about paid users from them. The surveys I saw when doing a quick google search reported much less than 1% of users paying.

Revenue runrate is over a billion a year now.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4007459-microsoft-backed-opena...

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#218

Post by colinsane »

ra7 wrote: post #203
strangemonad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

rephrasing this for LLMs instead of search: "you can create your own model architecture/training method, but you can't crawl the web and serve language query results to billions of worldwide users in a few milliseconds."

that checks out, right? Google/search == """Open"""AI/LLMs still seems like a decent metaphor to me.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#220

Post by phillipcarter »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #142
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is insane demand for good enough models at extremely good prices. Better beyond a certain point is unlikely to be competitive with the cheaper models.

Yes, this is correct. And OpenAI are currently the best at this.
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