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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#321

Post by wkat4242 »

imchillyb wrote: post #268
wkat4242 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They basically are MS by now. Everyone at Microsoft I work with literally calls it an 'aquisition'. Even though they only own a share. It's pretty clear what their plans are.

> Microsoft will reportedly get a 75% share of OpenAI's profits until it makes back the money on its investment, after which the company would assume a 49% stake in OpenAI. 49% isn't _just_ a share, it's a significant portion of the company.

It's what we call a non-controlling interest. Definitely not something that qualifies as an acquisition.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#322

Post by rnikander »

I've haven't looked into how these new AI products are implemented. Can someone give a ballpark estimate on the current costs if someone wanted to build their own, say:

1. LLM that talks like ChatGPT 2. Image generator that makes realistic portraits from verbal descriptions.

Are the costs in the data acquisition, human training input, training CPU/GPU hours, hardware, or ??

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#323

Post by yieldcrv »

jejeyyy77 wrote: post #84
serjester wrote: post #55

I think this is under appreciated. I run a "talk-to-your-files" website with 5ish K MRR and a pretty generous free tier. My OpenAI costs have not exceeded $200 / mo. People talk about using smaller, cheaper models but unless you have strong data security requirements you're burdening yourself with serious maintenance work and using objectively worse models to save pennies. This doesn't even consider OpenAI continuous…

how do ur customers feel about you uploading potentially confidential documents to a 3rd party?

most people don't care even when its required by their industry, and privacy isn’t a selling point on its own

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#324

Post by parentheses »

The comparison here is not apples to apples. While fine tuning is less costly with OpenAI, I'd argue that running inference using GPT3.5 vs a fine tuned model should be roughly the same. OpenAI is gouging you on inference, thereby being able to offer fine tuning at a seemingly reasonable price.

Also, it's important to note that fine tuning produces a vast amount of data about use cases where fine tuning is useful.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#325

Post by ang_cire »

xmprt wrote: post #229
noah_buddy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a funny point. After only taking Ubers and Lyfts all my adult life (young), I have recently switched to cabs because they are cheaper in my city (and I tell everyone I know to do the same). They have dominance now but if I had to guess whether cabs or Uber will still exist in 100 years… I know which I would bet on.

Cabs are an idea. Uber is a company. I can't think of any company that I'd predict to last 100 years. Even Google and Apple probably won't last 100 years. I honestly wouldn't even bet on cars being a dominant form of transportation in 100 years.

> I can't think of any company that I'd predict to last 100 years.

Coca-Cola, Nestle, and Unilever. Easy bet. Coca-Cola is already 137.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#326

Post by Karrot_Kream »

mlsu wrote: post #221
BoorishBears wrote: post #151

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…

> because the people who actually give a fuck about the risk NEED to have granular detail of what data, readable by whom, is stored exactly where and for how long, and how can you make sure, and how do you know that access is scoped to the absolute minimum number of people, and is there a paper trail for that?

You realize that Microsoft is a publicly traded company that has multiple privacy certifications? They have to subject to detailed data ownership and consumption audits. They most definitely have data ownership and retention logs and you can request for copies of their certification audits to understand how they log/track this. I think the parent is being too optimistic but your answer is so comically simplistic it's silly. I highly suggest you read about the world of HIPAA, PCI, and FedRAMP instead of just thinking "omg the data".

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#327

Post by taneq »

noah_buddy wrote: post #222
paulddraper wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s a funny point. After only taking Ubers and Lyfts all my adult life (young), I have recently switched to cabs because they are cheaper in my city (and I tell everyone I know to do the same). They have dominance now but if I had to guess whether cabs or Uber will still exist in 100 years… I know which I would bet on.

Uber's surge pricing is dumb in places where they're competing with traditional taxi ranks. I usually pay $35-$45 for an Uber to/from the airport, but if a couple of flights land at once, suddenly Uber is $85+ and the taxis are only $55.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#330

Post by BoorishBears »

kristopolous wrote: post #313

That was said about uber ... it's just being subsidized by vc. Wait until they expect a profit huggingface will be more of a winner in the long run with an exit via an MSFT acquisition if I had to call it.

This is like Uber if self-driving cars had simply been a matter of making a faster GPU.

OpenAI gets cheaper by twiddling their thumbs for the next few years, meanwhile they continue to amass more and more data for RLHF.

It's weird that people are trying to drag non-software scaling into a software scaling problem: Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, etc. all relied on VC dollars to scale non-software growth like software. OpenAI really is just stupidly cheap compared to anything those past high CAC plays were aiming to do.

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