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It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

stratechery.com

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Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#41

Post by yubblegum »

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

> Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model.

I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#42

Post by yc349833874923 »

barrenko wrote: post #18
kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

You could say the same thing about Facebook...

People say you're wrong but I agree. Facebook is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man between you and your friends/family. Instead of just talking to your family normally, like over the phone, now you have to talk to them in between mountains of Sponsored Content and AI-generated propaganda. It provides no productive value to the world except for making the world more annoying and making people more isolated from one another.

When you realize this, you realize that a lot of other supposedly valuable tech companies operate in the exact same way. Worrying that our parents' retirement depends heavily on their valuations!

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#43

Post by nakamoto_damacy »

pixl97 wrote: post #35
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even know who "Ben" is...

Anecdotes are only a datapoint and nearly meaningless by themselves. For a great many others just the stratechery.com website alone is enough to get a view and an upvote.

Are you sure Ben is not getting paid $7,000 per post by OpenAI?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#44

Post by bryanlarsen »

hn_throw_bs wrote: post #25

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

This is the paper that kicked off the current generation: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3....

That was 2017. And of course Google & UofT were working on it for many years before the paper was published.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#45

Post by nicce »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #24
aaa_aaa wrote: post #17

Openai is an artificially and ridiculously inflated balloon. It has nothing except initial market capture with hype. But yes they will keep whipping investors and keep burning money.

They also have the leading model.

In which area?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#46

Post by nakamoto_damacy »

tallowen wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #3

Whenever I see a post at #1 with not comment, I know it's been artificially pumped to the top. So many people upvoted but not a single comment yet. Let there be some comments! lol. OpenAI is a geopolitically important play besides being a tech startup so it gets pumped in funding and in PR, to show that we're still leading the world. But that premise is largely hallucinated.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

Are you sure Ben is not getting paid $7,000 per post by OpenAI?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#47

Post by alwa »

nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #14
tallowen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

I don't even know who "Ben" is...

Ben Thompson bopped around doing engineer things at Apple, Microsoft, and Automattic, until more than a decade ago he started this subscription newsletter with business-of-tech kind of analysis. The success of his paid newsletter gave Substack the idea [0].

A fair chunk of the tech who’s-who seem to find his thinking useful.

[0] https://www.vox.com/2017/10/16/16480782/substack-subscriptio...

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#48

Post by Karrot_Kream »

tallowen wrote: post #8
nakamoto_damacy wrote: post #3

Whenever I see a post at #1 with not comment, I know it's been artificially pumped to the top. So many people upvoted but not a single comment yet. Let there be some comments! lol. OpenAI is a geopolitically important play besides being a tech startup so it gets pumped in funding and in PR, to show that we're still leading the world. But that premise is largely hallucinated.

I had a different takeaway - that a lot of folks on here read Ben Thomson and respect his work! It sounds like Ben is pretty bullish on OpenAI and maybe he's convinced folks through his work to agree with this take.

This is just a roundup article (though there are still some good nuggets about Sora vs Meta's app.) Looking forward to another HN discussion purely driven through article title vibes. With nothing mooring the discussion, you know it's going to be "good".

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#49

Post by alonmower »

sergiotapia wrote: post #31

OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately. One URL replacement away and you can switch most models in minutes. I have personally done this many times over the last year and a half. It only takes labs to produce better and better models, and the race to bottom on token costs.

you could say the same thing about a search engine. if they keep an edge on brand or quality they can find ways of monetizing that attention

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#50

Post by llmslave »

kllrnohj wrote: post #13

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

They only invented modern AI, can easily be replaced!!
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