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

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

#511
post #258

Google literally publish the attention paper. Have people not been paying attention? Google has been the only company I’ve been watching that really understands what they are doing.

The company didn't publish the paper, employees did. And all of them have since moved on to other companies, including OpenAI.

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

#512
OpenAI fragmented into multiple companies that are now competing against them. OpenAI is buying compute and data.

Meanwhile, Google consolidated their AI operations under Google Deepmind and doubled down on TPUs.

The strategy "solve AGI and then solve everything else" is an all-in gamble that somehow AGI is within reach. This is not true.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not evidence of anything in and of itself. RIMs stock price was at its highest in 2009 two years after the iPhone came out.

I was curious about this - if my Google results are accurate, it looks like the stock actually peaked in June 2007, the same month that the iphone was released. It seems that Blackberry's market share of new phone sales peaked at 20% in 2009. So I'm not sure if it's coincidence, but it looks like the market actually did a pretty good job of pricing in the iphone/android risk well before it was strongly reflected in s…

You are correct. I remember the anecdote as something peaking. I thought it was the stock price. It was actually market share

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

#514

(My apologies if this was already asked - this thread is huge and Find-In-Page-ing for variations of "pre-train", "pretrain", and "train" turned up nothing about this. If this was already asked I'd super-appreciate a pointer to the discussion :) ) Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model? I understand it's very difficult, but they've already successfully done this and they…

> Genuine question: How is it possible for OpenAI to NOT successfully pre-train a model?

The same way everyone else fails at it.

Change some hyper parameters to match the new hardware (more params), maybe implement the latest improvements in papers after it was validated in a smaller model run. Start training the big boy, loss looks good, 2 months and millions of dollars later loss plateaus, do the whole SFT/RL shebang, run benchmarks.

It's not much better than the previous model, very tiny improvements, oops.

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

#515
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, I would get a ton of value out of someone selling dollars for 20 cents apiece. But ya, OAI is clearly making a ton of revenue. That doesn't mean it's a good business, though. Giving them a 20 year horizon, shareholders will be very upset unless the firm can deliver about a trillion in profit , not revenue, to justify the 100B (so far) in investment, and that would barely beat the long term s&p 500 average…

I'd be a little bit more nuanced: I think there's something off with their plans right now: it's pretty clear at this point that they can't own the technological frontier, Google is just too close already and from a purely technological PoV they are much better suited to have the best tech in the medium term. (There's no moat and Google has way more data and compute available, and also tons of cash to burn without de…

Being an insane brand means literally nothing if people can trivially switch to competitors, which they can.

There isn't even a tenth of enough money if you group together all of advertising. Like, the entire industry. Ads is a bad, bad plan that wont work. Advertising is also extremely overvalued. And even at it's overvalued price tag, it's nowhere near enough.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has no idea what it's own knowledge cutoff is.

Knowledge cutoff date is usually part of the system prompt. Helps you get useful answers like "I don't know that's too recent" when you ask questions like "who won the basketball game last night".

I opened up the Gemini app and asked:

Who are the Dallas Stars playing tonight? Is there anyone that will be out of the lineup for the Stars? What have their recent injuries been like? Can you get the current score?

It's response:

The Dallas Stars are playing the New York Rangers tonight, Tuesday, December 2, 2025, at Madison Square Garden.

Here is the information available regarding the rest of your questions:

Out of the Lineup & Recent Injuries *Lian Bichsel (Defenseman): He suffered a lower-body injury (ankle) in the recent game against the Senators and is expected to miss 6-8 weeks and require surgery. His absence will be felt on the blueline.

*Jake Oettinger (Goaltender): He is dealing with an illness and is not expected to start tonight; Casey DeSmith is projected to start in his place. Oettinger is expected to play tomorrow night in New Jersey.

*Thomas Harley (Defenseman): He remains week-to-week with a lower-body injury and is not with the team on their current road trip.

Other injured players who will likely be out of the lineup include Matt Duchene (Upper Body - on IR-LT, but joining the road trip), Adam Erne (Lower Body - on IR-LT), and Nils Lundkvist (Lower Body - on IR-LT).

Current Score The game is in progress, and the score is currently New York Rangers 1 - 1 Dallas Stars.

Would you like an update on the final score later, or news on a specific player's status?

I ask it things like updates on teams all the time, and it usually pulls the right information.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of which you will be able to do with your bundled assistant in the not-to-distant future. OpenAI is a basket case: - Too expensive and inconvenient to compete with commoditized, bundled assistants (from Google/ Microsoft/Apple) - Too closed to compete with cheap, customizable open-source models - Too dependent on partners - Too late to establish its own platform lock-in It echoes what happened to: - Netscape (squ…

So why does Salesforce still prosper? They are just a fancy database.

Because they lock you in. ChatGPT has no lock in, in fact none of the LLMs do just because of how they work.

Salesforce doesn't make a good product, and certainly not the best product. It doesn't matter, you don't need to if you can convince idiots with money to invest in you. And then the switching cost is too much, too late.

That business model is a dying one and all the software companies know it. That's why Microsoft has spent the last 15 years opening up their ecosystems. As automation increases, switching cost decreases. You cant rely on it.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's been said before but it's slightly insane they're trying to compete on a hot new tech with a company with 1) a top notch reputation for AI and 2) the largest money printer that has ever existed on the planet. Feel like the end result would always be that while Google is slow to adjust, once they're in the race they're in it it.

The problem for Google is that there is no sensible way to monetize this tech and it undercuts their main money source which is search. On top of that the Chinese seem to be hellbent to destroy any possible moat the US companies might create by flooding the market with SOTA open-source models. Although this tech might be good for software companies in general - it does reduce the main cost they have which is personne…

Gemini has been in Google search for a while now. I use it somewhat often when I search for something and want follow up questions. I don’t see any ads in Gemini but maybe I would see it if I search for ads relevant things idk. But I definitely use google search more often because Gemini is there and probably that goes for a lot of people.

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

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can generate $20 billion in ARR this year too! I just need you to give me $100 billion and allow me to sell each of your dollars for 0.2 dollars.

very clever! I hadn't seen anybody make this point before in any of these threads /s obviously the nature of OpenAIs revenue is very different than selling $1 for $0.2 because their customers are buying an actual service, not anything with resale value or obviously fungible for $

They're not selling a service, they're selling access to a service. You can access a more or less equivalent service from multiple companies.

The value of an LLM isn't an LLM. That's entirely 100% fungible. The value is exclusively what it produces.

If other people can produce the same thing, your LLM value approaches 0.

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

#520
I think we are finally seeing the effects of the steady stream of departures of top researchers and leaders from OpenAI since last year. Sure you can declare a "code red", but who is going to lead the effort? Set the direction? Do the heavy lifting? Chart the path forward? Sam Altman is a salesman, not a researcher. Ilya is no longer around. Most of the other top brass has been poached by Google/Meta/Anthropic or left to start their own thing. The people left behind are probably good at iterating, but can they really make the next leap forward on their own?
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