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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They have a soc 2 so literally an (external) auditor has looked at their data retention policies and if your business is a customer you should request access to the report

https://trust.openai.com/

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#302
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For years people have essentially made a living off FUD like "ignore the literal legal agreement and imagine all the worst case scenarios!!!" to justify absolutely farcical on-premise deployments of a lot of software, but AI is starting to ruin the grift. There are some cases where you really can't afford to send Microsoft data for their OpenAI offering... but there are a lot more where some figurehead solidified the…

Gah, this is just not how it works. You are probably right that e.g. patient information, private conversations, proprietary code, etc would be safe with OpenAI. But it's not the on-prem team that needs to convince the rest of the organization to keep things on prem. Quite the opposite -- every single tech person would love to make our data someone else's problem (and get a big career boost from dealing with cloud te…

Vendor risk management is a thing, and plenty of companies that work with medical data or legal data or financial data or sensitive government data and are, in fact, able to store that data with their vendors. This is a thing that happens all the time by literally all of the companies.

This nonsense that you can't trust anyone with your data is completely unfounded

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#303

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…

I was kind of curious because I’ve often felt the same about cheap Uber/Lyft rides. So I checked. I initially signed up with Lyft sometime in late 2015. The first airport ride I got from my house in Austin was in December of that year and they billed me $38 base fare and $1.50 airport surcharge. This was before tipping was available in the app as well.

I just took Lyft again to the airport earlier this month same location and I was billed $49 USD, and a $1.30 “Texas Surcharge”.

An inflation calculator says that $38 usd in 2015 is equivalent to $49 in 2023. Color me surprised. I thought the prices had significantly increased since I signed up but it looks like actually no they didn’t.

Trawling back through those old emails I do see constant “50% off all weekday rides” offers from the time I signed up until about March 2016, at which point they stopped. So there were some subsidized incentives when they were early in Austin but it looks like they stopped sometime in early 2016. So if the money train existed, it happened before that, at least in Austin.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#304

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…

> I doubt their model is the best in the world

For what reason do you doubt that?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My uninformed opinion is that Google and Meta's ML efforts are fragmented - It seems more likely that at Google at least they just fell into the classic innovator's dilemma in which they were stuck trying to apply innovation to their current business models in an attempt at incremental innovation instead of seeking an entirely different customer and market.

Yeah, same with Meta. Both have a large graveyard of failed innovation attempts. Remember Google Buzz? Google Plus?

Continuing the litany: https://killedby.tech/google/

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between openai and next best model seems to be increasing and not decreasing. Maybe Google's gemini could be competitive, but I don't believe open source will match OpenAI's capability ever. Also OpenAI gets significant discount on compute due to favourable deals from Nvidia and Microsoft. And they could design their server better for their homogenous needs. They are already working on AI chip.

Being ahead in a race doesn’t mean you’re going to win. Open source models will win eventually because they have the lowest marginal cost to run. People will figure out what OpenAI is doing and duplicate it. There’s many people working at OpenAI, it’s going to leak out.

Did you even read my comment? I specifically highlighted why openai might be cheaper in long run. One is they are already working on a chip that would be better just for running a single model.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#307

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…

This is true. The fields are green and lush with things that don't scale: freemium and low prices to get people hooked. The crack dealers will almost inevitably go full Unity when they are forced by their board of directors to turn a profit.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#308

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…

Moore's law is irrelevant. Large language models are going to leave the digital paradigm behind altogether. Neural nets don't need fully precise digital computing. Especially with quantization we're seeing that losing a bit of precision in the weights isn't impactful. Now that we're serving huge foundation models with static weights there's an enormous incentive to develop analog hardware to run them. Mark my words,…

> Just think, how many multiplications per second is the light refracting through your window right now clocking?

It really depends where you draw the lines, because you could also say that one single transistor in my electrical CPU is doing a kerjillion calculations for all of the atoms and electrons involved.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty obvious to most that switching cloud providers is not quick or painless for the majority of orgs. There's not really an argument in good faith to suggest otherwise. Especially given that many orgs use managed or cloud specific solutions that have no 1:1 mapping between vendors

I said I'd have to change that one managed resource. Actually it's two - the managed database. But no more.

> I said I'd have to change that one managed resource. Actually it's two - the managed database. But no more.

As someone who worked on a similar project recently, I'm getting that idea that you obviously don't know what you're talking about.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#310

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…

It seems to be compelling because a genie has been the promise of technological progress forever and let's be honest, it's been marketed as such. Why would people not invest in that unless you were a technological savvy skeptic like yourself.
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