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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

#661

Post by alephnerd »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #657
alephnerd wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Chinese leadership is somewhat skeptical about AI maximalism [0] with worries about "AI Washing" by enthusiastic cadre trying to climb rungs [1], and evoking Solow's Paradox [2]. There is still significant value in AI/ML Applications from a NatSec perspective, but no one is actually seriously thinking about AGI in the near future. In a lot of cases, AI from a NatSec perspective is around labor augmentation (how…

Pointing to Solow’s Paradox is kind of weird to me. Productivity growth accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, so it’s easy to tell a story where the computer age simply didn’t accelerate things until it had sufficiently penetrated the economy. If AI follows the same pattern, betting big on it still makes sense: China would probably be the predominant superpower if the computing developments of the 70s and 80s were center…

The point is that just like in the US, Chinese decision-makers are increasingly voicing concerns about unrealistic assumptions, valuations, and expectations around the capabilities of AI/ML.

You can be optimistic about the value of agentic workflows or domain specific applications of LLMs but at the same time recognize that something like AGI is horseshit techno-millenarianism. I myself have made a pretty successful career so far following this train of logic.

The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit, and in a country like China where the median household income is in the $300-400/mo range and the vast majority of citizens are not tech adjacent, it can lead to potential discontent.

The Chinese government is increasingly sensitive to these kinds of capital misallocations after the Evergrande Crisis and the ongoing domestic EV Price War between SoEs, because vast amounts of government capital is being burnt with little to show for it from an outcomes perspective (eg. a private company like BYD has completely trounced every other domestic EV competitor in China - the majority of whom are state owned and burnt billions investing in SoEs that never had a comparative advantage against BYD or an experienced automotive SoE like SAIC).

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

#663

Post by stevedonovan »

p1necone wrote: post #334
jdoliner wrote: post #274

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 m…

Every so often I try out a GPT model for coding again, and manage to get tricked by the very sparse conversation style into thinking it's great for a couple of days (when it says nothing and then finishes producing code with a 'I did x, y and z' with no stupid 'you're absolutely' right sucking up and it works, it feels very good). But I always realize it's just smoke and mirrors - the actual quality of the code and t…

I've been getting great results from Codex. Can be a bit slow, but gets there. Writes good Rust, powers through integration test generation.

So (again) we are just sharing anecdata

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

#664

Post by sholain »

lateforwork wrote: post #228

OpenAI has already lined up enormous long-term commitments — over $500 billion through initiatives like Stargate for U.S. data centers, $250 billion in spending on Microsoft Azure cloud services, and tens of billions on AMD’s plan to deliver 6 GW of Instinct GPUs. Meanwhile, Oracle has financed its role in Stargate with at least $18 billion in corporate bonds plus another $9.6 billion in bank loans, and analysts expe…

"it would struggle to honor its long-term agreements. That failure would cascade. Oracle, for example, could be left with massive liabilities and no matching revenue stream,"

No, there's a not of noise about this but these are just 'statements of intent'.

Oracle very intimately understands OpenAI's ability to pay.

They're not banking $50B in chips and then waking up naively one morning to find out OpenAI has no funding.

What will 'cascade' is maybe some sentiment, or analysts expectations etc.

Some of it, yes, will be a problem - but at this point, the data centre buildout is not an OpenAI driven bet - it's a horizontal be across tech.

There's not that much risk in OpenAI not raising enough to expand as much as it wants.

Frankly - a CAPEX slowdown will hit US GDP growth and freak people out more than anything.

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

#665

Post by reilly3000 »

vel0city wrote: post #560
warkdarrior wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The consumer apps use RAG and traditional search to give the LLM recent information in the prompt when it answers your query. This basically bridges over the knowledge gap between the end of training and today.

I'm fully aware, I'm just wanting to point out to people that the actual AI apps they'll use can and do return recent information due to integrations like that. Lots of people think AI can only answer stuff in its training set, but it can answer anything from whatever data you hand to it, including any data on the internet. Lots of AI tools can easily answer "who won the basketball game last night".

GCP is sort of blending this into their Gemini APIs.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search

You don’t have to do RAG or use a serp scraper MCP, just add the Search Grounding tool to the APzi request and it does the rest at the model’s discretion and $0.014 / search.

I think that’s generally a fair price for my time vs doing my own search queries at 1/100th the speed. It could get expensive for deep research type queries.

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

#666

Post by khafra »

echelon wrote: post #647
redbluered wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differentiation should be open source, nonprofit, and ethical. As a shady for-profit, there is none. That's the problem with this particular fraud.

Why is profit bad? You can be open source, ethical, and for-profit.

If you start out as a non-profit, and pull a bunch of shady shenanigans in order to convert to a for-profit, claiming to be ethical after that is a bit of a hard sell.

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

#667

Post by dragonwriter »

reilly3000 wrote: post #665
vel0city wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fully aware, I'm just wanting to point out to people that the actual AI apps they'll use can and do return recent information due to integrations like that. Lots of people think AI can only answer stuff in its training set, but it can answer anything from whatever data you hand to it, including any data on the internet. Lots of AI tools can easily answer "who won the basketball game last night".

GCP is sort of blending this into their Gemini APIs. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search You don’t have to do RAG or use a serp scraper MCP, just add the Search Grounding tool to the APzi request and it does the rest at the model’s discretion and $0.014 / search. I think that’s generally a fair price for my time vs doing my own search queries at 1/100th the speed. It could get expensive for deep resea…

The pricing may be reasonable, but Grounding with Google Search has extremely restrictive terms of use.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms#grounding-with-google...

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

#668

Post by jatins »

andai wrote: post #594

They don't have much to worry about as long as Google keeps focusing on the models and neglecting the experience of actually using them.

Gemini app is pretty solid and aistudio is a good dev focused offering. GCP and Vertex AI is still a bit of a mess but I wouldn't say the overall UX is too bad at this point

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

#669

Post by gloosx »

jpalomaki wrote: post #356
p1necone wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every so often I try out a GPT model for coding again, and manage to get tricked by the very sparse conversation style into thinking it's great for a couple of days (when it says nothing and then finishes producing code with a 'I did x, y and z' with no stupid 'you're absolutely' right sucking up and it works, it feels very good). But I always realize it's just smoke and mirrors - the actual quality of the code and t…

Can you give some concrete example of programming problem task GPT fails to solve? Interested, because I’ve been getting pretty good results with different tasks using the Codex.

Try to ask it to write some GLSL shaders. Just describe what you want to see and then try to run the shaders it outputs. It can output a UV-map or the simple gradient right, but when it comes to shaders a bit more complex it most of the time will not compile or run properly, sometimes mix GLSL versions, sometimes just straight make up things which don't work or output what you want.

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

#670

Post by curioussquirrel »

bncndn0956 wrote: post #636
bibimsz wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anecdotal, but my wife wasn't interested in switching to claude from chatgpt. as far as she's concerned chatgpt knows her, and she's got her assistant perfectly tuned to her liking.

this is my horror as well. I don't mind my youtube account to be blocked but what about all the recommendations that I have curated to my liking. It will be huge chunk of lost time to rebuild and insert my preferences into the algorithm. increasingly "our preferences shaped by time and influences and encounters both digital and offline" are as much about us as we are physically.

You could ask GPT for what it knows about you and use it to seed your personal preferences to a new model/app. Not perfect and probably quite lossy, but likely much better than starting from scratch.
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