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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Apple will last 100 years. See their latest AR product. They continue to create amazing products that are relevant to the masses.

I had the opposite impression on AR. A useless gimmick no sane people will use. Apple did good with the M processors though

Never underestimate the allure of status symbols. For the longest time I thought the same thing of the iPhone. Why would people spend so much when they can get Android for considerably cheaper ? It's the status stupid. Of course, now they are ubiquitious and no longer really much of a status symbol, but if you go back a decade, you'll know what I'm talking about. The same will happen with VR as the tech improves and prices drop a bit.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#352

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…

Possibly unrealistic, but my fear is that they will end up like Netflix more than uber. Some will scream in horror but I wanted Netflix to be a monopoly. A single place and app and account with all the content I need. "competition" in streaming space has been nothing but disastrous for me as a consumer. It led to greedy heterogeneous islands of content, with proliferation of crappy apps and pointless restrictions and…

I don’t think you can really compare that. The streaming service market is not elastic because you cannot easily interchange one series for another.

If other vendors LLMs become good enough it will actually be easily to interchange and then the race for the best UX and integration will be upon us (which the other commenter alluded to).

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I got the impression that Google was running Bard on a smaller model with presumably cheaper inference costs. I imagine the unit economics of both Bard and Chat GPT are negative right now and Google is trying to stay in the game without lighting too much money on fire.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#354

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…

Because the cost of entry to the market is so absurdly high right now, it is seen as a good investment opportunity. If you throw enough money at it you can make your place no nice and early and then win later by sheer experience in the field. That is the idea.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#355
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Uber in SF all the time, and while it's absolutely more expensive than it was during those go-go years, it's actually an even better experience than it was before (specifically on how fast it is to get a driver near you).

You must be experiencing another SF than me...

What's gotten worse in your experience?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Google and Facebook are not interested in pooling all their resources in order to build the next big thing. They are just interested in doing “enough” so that people keep using their platforms. The race is about how often a day every person on the planet spends on either google or Facebook/instagram. It’s about who is “the homepage of the internet”. They just need to be good enough so that traffic doesn’t move off to chat gpt.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#357
post #315
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be forgetting the cost to train a 1.8T model.

The cost is peanuts compared to the potential profit. Apple/Google/Facebook could absolutely eat the costs for a skunkworks project to do that training and just sit quietly waiting on the yes/no from legal.

But the question is rather of the cost are peanuts compared to expected cash flow for the next 12 months.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#358
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should probably just be using the best that's available (OpenAI). Sure, if you want to let a monopoly have all the added value while you get to keep the rest you can do that. Just make sure you're never successful enough to inspire them though, otherwise you're dead the next minute. Oops.

5k monthly revenue (or even 100k) isn't big enough for OpenAI to care. It's barely big enough for a competitor to care. I suspect that OpenAI doesn't have the bandwidth to build most uses of ai and so is in the bill gates platform land: the ecosystem should be pocketing more money than the owner of the platform is.

Now

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#359
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm running the tech for a global startup with 100M EUR turnover. It's still pretty small, but it's something.

You need to plan ahead, sure. Portability was one of my main concerns (including the possibility to go self-hosted). But it's definitely not impossible, nor too hard to do.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#360
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

> ...but you'd struggle to get close to even GPT 3.5 let alone 4 for generic tasks.

But tasks are only generic in the aggregate, and with local models you can hand-off between different models for different tasks.

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