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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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291–300 of 426 posts

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#291

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…

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

It's too early to say who is winning/will win, of course. But so far the UI and its accessibility have made a huge difference in how different gen AI models are being used.

For example, I struggle to see DALL-E winning over Firefly if Firefly is integrated into a very rich environment, whereas DALL-E is basically prompt UI only (while DALL-E 3 is a better model IMO).

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#292
I will abandon ChatGPT, Claude etc... the millisecond that Siri has the same capabilities if for no other reason than it will take me two extra steps to use it and pay for it. Every voice assistant will unquestionably and inevitably implement GPTs eventually. So it's simply back to the question of who has the distribution of chatbots. I trust Apple 1000x more than basically any other tech company (not saying much) so I'm just waiting for that now.

OpenAI can't "win" (whatever that means) long term unless they figure out how to collect user data inputs (text based questions) and reward vectors (Thumbs up and down) persistently, at scale, in the extreme long term - which means building something people rely on all day everyday.

As far as I can tell they have no unique distribution avenues to do this today outside of copilot.

Meanwhile, Apple, Amazon and Alphabet are certainly bringing GPT capabilities to Siri/Alexa/Whatever Google's voice thing is called, albeit slower and more carefully, but they have no need to rush at all here.

I'll bet Microsoft will slowly absorb OpenAI given their investment position and integrate it into Bing or something and fade away.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#293
post #271
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it very expensive to do this? Don't you need a jacked up PC with multiple expensive NVidia cards?

A jacked up PC can do really well and there is much fun to be had there. ...but you'd struggle to get close to even GPT 3.5 let alone 4 for generic tasks. For custom tunes...yeah sure custom rolls will beat generic openAI. But that's a bit like pitting customed tuned cars against street legal manufacturer cars. It's an apple to oranges comparison

If it takes ~150k / year on AWS to fine tune, I'd assume ~50k onprem based on experience with cloud pricing.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#294
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the undisputed winners will be the very few firms with enough engineering resources and GPUs to train their own models (not just fine-tune) where the models in question increase the productivity of workers in their non-ai-related profit centers. After that we have the real question of what the future will be of open source LLMs, on the one hand, and the question most relevant to this article of what sort an…

This was definitely a theory that made people burn tons of money on the past couple of years, but I don’t think it holds water. These models are getting obsolete so fast, and there’s so many open ones, I doubt any one’s privately trained model can stay relevant for long

The data is the moat.

(If you can train your internally deployed LLM on data none of your competitors have, that's an advantage).

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The winner is going to be the consumers Cloud infra may be a comparable market, since computation is a big share of AI costs. Did consumers win big from competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP? Not sure. I see an uptick in write ups saying “We switched off cloud and reduced costs by 2/3rds.” Not a scientific sample but may leave the question open.

Can confirm: The cloud computing fad is well underway to dying...that is why AI is booming. One need only to follow the wall street dollars to figure that one out. Several very big profile names have recently begun moving back to self-hosted, hybrid, or dedicated hosting solutions. Cloud computing never was good in terms of value, however, it was only good in terms of scalability. AI solutions built on top of 'the cl…

Which cloud provider is it, if you don’t mind sharing?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#297

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…

Silly argument when the Uber cycle has yet to achieve durable profits via monopoly

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, at this rate they'll be at parity with Infocom by 2030.

So their customers will have a difficult time figuring out that they should put a fish in their ear?

Wait'll you see what they charge for hints.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#299

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…

Unity. Atlassian. Jetbrains. Elastic.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#300

I think OpenAI may eventually have to go upmarket, as basic "good enough" AI becomes increasingly viable and cheap/free on consumer level devices, supplied by FOSS models and apps. Apple may be leading the way here, with Apple Silicon prioritizing AI processing and built into all their devices. These capabilities are free (or at least don't require an extra sub), and just used to sell more hardware. OpenAI is clearly…

Yep, we agree that the obvious direction of innovation for OSS models is smaller and cheaper, likely at roughly the same quality: https://generatingconversation.substack.com/p/open-source-ll...

I actually expect open source models will be small _but larger than they are today_ because phones and laptops will get dedicated chips and software for running eg the best open source (weights?) model

So eventually you could be running decent sized models locally (iOS could even provide an API with fine tuning etc)

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