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You can't build a moat with AI

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41–49 of 49 posts

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data doesn't exist, you can't train an (neural network) AI as they exist today. Whatever thing people build, will be based on data that exists, not data that will be created afterwards. And guess what, you don't have that data.

You could bootstrap a niche model using what's available and go from there. I don't think it's all that different from any other kind of bootstrapping startups tend to require.

Bootstrap a niche model based on what?

On the yet to exist data?

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not feasible. A network request to groq type machines will outperform your local hardware by such a huge amount that it wont make sense other than some very niche tasks

Except nobody but groq has such type of machines, and the economics of cloud AI is very hard to make it works in practice. Offloading the capital cost (which is the hardest kind of cost to swallow for a company) to customers is very compelling business-wise.

[deleted]

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not feasible. A network request to groq type machines will outperform your local hardware by such a huge amount that it wont make sense other than some very niche tasks

Except nobody but groq has such type of machines, and the economics of cloud AI is very hard to make it works in practice. Offloading the capital cost (which is the hardest kind of cost to swallow for a company) to customers is very compelling business-wise.

What they are doing is not very special soon a lot of companies will do it. Lets call it end to end LLM hardware

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except nobody but groq has such type of machines, and the economics of cloud AI is very hard to make it works in practice. Offloading the capital cost (which is the hardest kind of cost to swallow for a company) to customers is very compelling business-wise.

What they are doing is not very special soon a lot of companies will do it. Lets call it end to end LLM hardware

And they will be in everyone's laptop, because that's pretty much the only economically viable way way to amortize the development cost ;)

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has explained how they could use that data without producing a model that would emit private information.

Perhaps de-identification before training could be helpful here. Microsoft does seem active in this, e.g. https://microsoft.github.io/presidio/

None of that stuff actually works. You can remove someone's social security number from the data but there is still only one person at the exact intersection of all the data that isn't individually considered personally identifying but collectively it still is.

Moreover, that isn't even the problem here. Suppose your company has a trade secret. You know how to manufacture widgets more efficiently than your competitors. If Microsoft produces a model that will now tell your competitors your secret process that it learned from your internal emails, it's completely irrelevant whether they stripped the PII out of your emails first.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude 3 Opus

Opus is an order of magnitude more expensive and slower than GPT-4.

doesn't matter that it's more expensive though, it beats it in benchmarks

also, it's not "an order of magnitude" more expensive

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#49
“ For reference, our team at RunLLM has spent roughly 70% of our engineering cycles in the last quarter on data engineering — everything from pre-processing data at ingestion time to implementing hybrid search to reranking results.”

This to me is why I am actually bullish on building ‘LLM wrappers’ that are sustainable businesses. While you might not be developing new technology, you can be adding value to a client who can use chat gpt and “talk to your docs” but not the surrounding work to make it frictionless for their workflow or company and actually build a business. It’s entirely possible that AI will get so good that it makes it easy to all the surrounding tasks too.

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