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

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

#111

Post by ebb_earl_co »

Insanity wrote: post #105
aerhardt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm extremely loyal to ChatGPT Plus and Codex, but is't because OpenAI has a native Mac app that I like, and Codex included with Plus and has served me well enough to not look at Claude. I like GPT-5 quite a bit as a user. I'll concede none of these are small things - they've had my money for 2+ years - but they're not gigantic advantages either. At an enterprise level however, in the current workload I am deal…

I don’t think they will get any moat. I might be wrong on this of course, but I don’t see a killer feature for these stochastic parrots that can’t be easily replicated

> … stochastic parrots… What a wonderful phrase, mind if I borrow it?

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

#112

Post by jaredcwhite »

AgentME wrote: post #107
karel-3d wrote: post #83

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

Hasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every year for the last few years now? And that models are never going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be reassured that big tech is going away soon.

Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.

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

#113

Post by tptacek »

thereitgoes456 wrote: post #89
lkrubner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to o…

He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it". In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem . In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.

Is he right on the AI stuff? Like, on the OpenAI company stuff he could be? I don't know? But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.

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

#114

Post by nextworddev »

chmod775 wrote: post #37
barrenko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same thing about Facebook...

You mean the social network that is currently dying the same death as countless other platforms before it, just on a larger scale? Maybe some are too young to remember the great migrations from/to MySpace, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Skype, local alternatives like StudiVZ, ..., where people used to keep in contact with friends. Facebook was just the latest and largest platform where people kept in touch and expressed themselves i…

Last time I checked 99% of normies are still happily scrolling FB and Instagram

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

#115

Post by jgalt212 »

yubblegum wrote: post #41
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…

If you took any of current top 3 models from me, I would not miss the deleted one in the least. I run almost every non-trivial prompt through multiple models anyway.

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

#116

Post by tptacek »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #112
AgentME wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every year for the last few years now? And that models are never going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be reassured that big tech is going away soon.

Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.

He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.

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

#117

Post by BeetleB »

yen223 wrote: post #109
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…

A lot of the points also apply to Google as a search engine, yet we're still seeing Google owning about 90% of search engine usage.

Google search requires a lot of resources to crawl, keep indices up to date, and provide user level significance (i.e. different results to different users). Then couple it with their other services (Google Maps, etc).

The competitors have not come even close to Google's level of quality.

With LLMs, it's different. Gemini/Claude are as good, for the most part. And users don't care that much either - most use the standard free ChatGPT, which likely is worse than many competitors' paid models.

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

#118

Post by wilg »

moistoreos wrote: post #100
karel-3d wrote: post #83

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

You could literally eliminate homelessness, world hunger, and fully pay health care costs in that same timeframe with much less cash.

If that's true, all you have to do is convince other people that it's true and they can just vote for someone to deploy that money. Don't need to wait for someone else to do it.

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

#119

Post by nemothekid »

thereitgoes456 wrote: post #89
lkrubner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to o…

He was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it". In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem . In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.

He's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work.

I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.

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

#120

Post by impossiblefork »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #102
karel-3d wrote: post #83

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

All that money and they’ve been trying to shy away from talk of AGI recently to lower expectations.

The AI is getting better at things like maths. I recently asked it about iterating the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and it appeared to really understand that. It's not super easy to reason about why it's reversible, etc. and I felt that it got it.

This is obviously not AGI, and we're very far from AGI as we can see by trying out these LLMs on things like stories or on analyzing text, or dealing with opposing arguments, but for programming and maths performance is at a level where it's actually useful.

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