Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 960 posts

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#181

Post by another_twist »

gaigalas wrote: post #97
another_twist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's no monetization, the industry will just collapse. Not a good thing to aspire to. I hope they make money whilst doing these improvements.

> the industry will just collapse Wait, so all of that talk of ushering an era of innovation and new opportunities was just a lie, and the thing needs dinosaur-era stuff like ads and online shopping to survive? Seems disingenuous.

Ads have a very high profit margin. Ultimately we all get to cool shit because some consumer somehwere is buying something. Depending on whether you work in B2B or consumer software you are just a step closer or farther from the consumer. But ultimately its people who dont write code who decide the fate of the software industry.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#182

Post by aftbit »

badmonster wrote: post #99

"Code red" feels like theater. Competition is healthy - Google's compute advantage was always going to matter once they got serious. The real question isn't who's ahead this quarter, but whether anyone can maintain a moat when the underlying tech is rapidly commoditizing.

"Who is ahead this quarter" is pretty much all that the market and finance types care about. Maybe "who will be ahead next year" as a stretch. Nobody looks beyond a few quarters. Given how heavily AI is currently driven by (and driving!) the investment space, it's not surprising that they'll find themselves yanked around by extremely short term thinking.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#183

Post by laluser »

Andrex wrote: post #111
badmonster wrote: post #99

"Code red" feels like theater. Competition is healthy - Google's compute advantage was always going to matter once they got serious. The real question isn't who's ahead this quarter, but whether anyone can maintain a moat when the underlying tech is rapidly commoditizing.

It feels like (to me) that Google's TPU advantage (speculation is Meta is buying a bunch) will be one of the last things to be commoditized, which gives them a larger moat. Normal chips are hard enough to come by for this stuff.

OAI is already working on shipping their own chips.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#184

Post by trhway »

achow wrote: post #146

WSJ: Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse. These plus working with Jony Ive on hardware, makes it sound like they took their eyes off the ball.

it in't about taking eyes off the ball, it is about playing very different ball - they de-facto became commercial entity with short term plans/goals/targets/metrics and all the management games creeping in. Beating Google, such a large company who has been successfully playing that game for quarter of century is very hard, if not impossible until Google would make serious error itself.

And pure tech-wise - they seem to have went all-in on corp management understandable way of doing things - hardware(money) scaling which, while unavoidable in this game, must be accompanied by theoretic-algorithmic improvements as pure hardware scale game is again where Google is hardly beatable.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#185

Post by throwaway290 »

greenavocado wrote: post #141
Andrex wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did anybody ever get banned for searching the wrong keywords? No, but they probably pass clusters of (perceived to be) dangerous searches on to the Feds. Talking out my ass though.

They do pass it on to the feds https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

> They do pass it on to the feds

just like closedai, no?

> we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team

https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#186

Post by lukan »

emp17344 wrote: post #142
binarymax wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Benchmaxxing galore by lots of teams in this space.

I think it’s entirely possible that AI actually has plateaued, or has reached a point where a jump in intelligence comes at the cost of reliability.

AI in general? Not at all. LLM's maybe a little bit, when even Sam Altman said, the progress is logarithmic to the investment. Still, there is progress. And the potential of LLM based agents, where many different models and other technics are mixed in together, we just started to explore.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#187

Post by twothreeone »

vkou wrote: post #180
twothreeone wrote: post #174

The way I've experienced "Code Red" is mostly as a euphemism for "on-going company-wide lack of focus" and a band-aid for mid-level management having absolutely no clue how to meaningfully make progress, upper management panicking, and ultimately putting engineers and ICs on the spot to bear the brunt of that organizational mess. Interestingly enough, apart from Google, I've never seen an organization take the actual…

This code red also has the convenient benefit of giving an excuse to stop work on more monetization features... Which, when implemented, would have the downside of tethering OpenAI's valuation to reality.

Good point too. Though it makes me wonder if "We declared Code Red" is really enough to justify eye-watering valuations.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#188

Post by laluser »

eden-u4 wrote: post #125
Andrex wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like (to me) that Google's TPU advantage (speculation is Meta is buying a bunch) will be one of the last things to be commoditized, which gives them a larger moat. Normal chips are hard enough to come by for this stuff.

Also, they have all the infra to actually use all that tpus advantage (as well as actual researchers, contrariwise to OpenAI)

That will be less of a problem since OAI can spill out to other providers as needed if their own capacity is under high utilization. They already use coreweave, aws, azure, etc. Google doesn't do that as far as I know and don't see why they would, so they are stuck eating the capacity planning.

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#189

Post by laxd »

redml wrote: post #127

it's hard to get invested into anything google when they've been non stop killing products or making them worse for over a decade.

Certainly not the only one making things worse. Software has become an enemy of the people in the last 10 years. Remember when the internet was nominated for Nobel Peace price?

Re: OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

#190

Post by danans »

This will keep going around the table, next it might be a Chinese company that demos 98% of the capability at 1/4 the price. The objective of being at the cutting edge of LLM performance seems like more of a marketing advantage in the game of sucking in more capital for a moatless technology.
Post reply on HN