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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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381–390 of 426 posts

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#381

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> Does anyone suck at that? Does android even have native OCR? Last I checked everything required an OCR app of varying quality (including windows/linux). On ios/macos you can literally just click on a picture and select the text in it as if it wasn't a picture. I know for sure on iOS you don't even open an app to do it, just any picture you can select it. Last I checked the Opensource OCR tools were decent but behin…

Android has had built in OCR for a few releases. You can copy and paste text from any image/app you can display on the screen. To use, go to the app switcher and just start selecting text. It's funny trying to select text in a video while the video is playing...

> Android has had built in OCR for a few releases. You can copy and paste text from any image/app you can display on the screen.

AFAIK this is a feature only available on Google Pixel devices. so not on 'Android' in general.

For one, my Oppo device running Android 12 doesn't have it.

Yes, Android fragmentation sucks.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They aren't that ubiquitous in the UK/Europe or Asia. I've never used an iPhone. I'm not sure of the market share figures but I'd guess it's about 50/50. Similarly with Mac laptops you get the impression that everyone buys apple, but it's really not the case and it's probably more like 75% windows at a guess.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#383
So how could OpenAI make fine-tuning so cheap? Beside the computing power you need for fine-tuning, OpenAI also have to save your fine-tuned weights, and spawn a new instance for you every time you want to run your fine-tuned model. If so, I imagine it must be insanely expensive because the inference only model of ChatGPT is not what one can say "small". So, how did they do that? Can anyone share their "secret"?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#384
Disagree with this. Model quality is THE factor keeping them ahead.

I think a comparison to Netflix and the media industry is fair. Years ago, people claimed Netflix's tech and infrastructure was their moat, but it turns out it was the cheap easy access to loads of high quality content that was the real motivator.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#385

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> 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.

There are a HUGE number of startups that would have had a massively harder time if they had to roll their own infra. Who cares if the companies eventually have to move off? (Though even Netflix seems ok with it overall for now). There are a ton of services that just wouldn't exist otherwise

Renting a server and using standard commodity open source software and standard (outsourced) sysadmins is way cheaper and faster than learning and dealing with all the proprietary AWS and Azure junk.

(Probably also less reliable than "cloud", but who cares if you're a startup.)

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#386

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I disagree, at early startup scale you don't need much, you just buy a better VPS when you need to scale up Learning aws vs learning how to operate a vps are of comparable complexity It took me less then a day to setup infra for my startup (more than 10 years ago)

If you're just running VPS on the big clouds, you're not going to get much advantage out of it, indeed. But tell me what third tier cheap provider has managed scale-to-zero-or-infinity functions? Managed storage with S3-like API? Where can I get an API gateway cheaper than Amazon? What about managed databases? These tools allow me to develop insanely scalable software incredibly easily. Agreed - all the big clouds ar…

> Managed storage with S3-like API?

What's third tier here? Pretty much all of them offer S3 compatibility it's basically table stakes

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#387

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…

Not only that there is Azure Services for OpenAI which is a more corporate offering with regions, Azure AD integration etc.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#388

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…

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…

The real problem for the OP is not prices going up but open AI making something like the AI equivalent of Excel (an AI swiss army knife) such that middle companies are not needed for chatbots or talk to your pdf type apps.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#389

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…

> Possibly unrealistic, but my fear is that they will end up like Netflix more than uber.

I am convinced that's how they will end up.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the basilisk?

Not exactly but it would be a good name for it! If you run it you get some money and higher balances mean better treatment when it takes over.

Assuming the baseline treatment is very bad, this is exactly what Roko's basilisk is.
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