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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

#761

Post by rvnx »

impulser_ wrote: post #643
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…

OpenAI is the only SOTA model provider that doesn't have a cutoff date in the current year. That why it preforms bad at writing code for any new libraries or libraries that have had significant updates like Svelte.

State Of The Art is maybe a bit exaggerated. It's more like an early model that never really adapted, and only got watered down (smaller network, outdated information, and you cannot see thought/reasoning).

Also their models get dumber and dumber over time.

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

#762

Post by [deleted] »

alecco wrote: post #730
RossBencina wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SemiAnalysis article that you linked to stated: "OpenAI’s leading researchers have not completed a successful full-scale pre-training run that was broadly deployed for a new frontier model since GPT-4o in May 2024, highlighting the significant technical hurdle that Google’s TPU fleet has managed to overcome." Given the overall quality of the article, that is an uncharacteristically convoluted sentence. At the ris…

My reading in between the lines is OpenAI's "GPT-5" is really a GPT-4 generation model. And this is aligned with it being unimpressive. Not the promised leap forward Altman promised.

[deleted]

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

#763

Post by rvnx »

outside1234 wrote: post #634

OpenAI is toast. Google has a model advantage, hardware advantage (TPUs), and business advantage (I hear they are good at selling ads). It is all physics from here.

They are also good at selling cloud hosting and services like LLMs (despite their horrible billing practices where there is no limit)

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

#764

Post by sigmoid10 »

matwood wrote: post #708
sigmoid10 wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the hardware is actually the easy part. Everyone and their uncle who had some cash have tried by now: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Huawei, Amazon, Intel - the list goes on and on. But Nvidia is not a chip company. Huang himself said they are mostly a software company. And that is how they were able to build a gigantic moat. Because noone else has even come close on the software side. Google is the only one who has…

Are you saying that Google, Meta, Amazon, etc... can't do software? It's the bread and butter of these companies. The CUDA moat is important to hold off the likes of AMD, but hardware like TPUs for internal use or other big software makers is not a big hurdle. Of course Huang will lean on the software being key because he sees the hardware competition catching up.

Huang said that many years ago, long before ChatGPT or the current AI hype were a thing. In that interview he said that their costs for software R&D and support are equal or even bigger than their hardware side. They've also been hiring top SWE talent for almost two decades now. None of the other companies have spent even close to this much time and money on GPU software, at least until LLMs became insanely popular. So I'd be surprised to see them catch up anytime soon.

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

#765

Post by threeducks »

rglullis wrote: post #311
bgirard wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fun trope to repeat but that's not what OpenAI is doing. I get a ton of value from ChatGPT and Codex from my subscription. As long as the inference is not done at a lost this analogy doesn't hold. They're not paying me to use it. They are generating output that is very valuable to me. Much more than my subscription cost. I've been able to help setup cross app automation for my partner's business, remodel my ho…

> They're not paying me to use it. Of course they are. > As long as the inference is not done at a loss. If making money on inference alone was possible, there would be a dozen different smaller providers who'd be taking the open weights models and offering that as service. But it seems that every provider is anchored at $20/month, so you can bet that none of them can go any lower.

You need a certain level of batch parallelism to make inference efficient, but you also need enough capacity to handle request floods. Being a small provider is not easy.

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

#766

Post by Glemkloksdjf »

matwood wrote: post #683
binkHN wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really great breakdown. With TPUs seemingly more efficient and costing less overall, how does this play for Nvidia? What's to stop them from entering the TPU race with their $5 trillion valuation?

As others mentioned, 5T isn't money available to NVDA. It could leverage that to buy a TPU company in an all stock deal though. The bigger issue is that entering a 'race' implies a race to the bottom. I've noted this before, but one of NVDA's biggest risks is that its primary customers are also technical, also make hardware, also have money, and clearly see NVDA's margin (70% gross!!, 50%+ profit) as something they w…

Nvidia has everything they need to build the most advanced GPU Chip in the world and mass produce it.

Everything.

They can easily just do this for more optimized Chips.

"easily" in sense of that wouldn't require that much investment. Nvidia knows how to invest and has done this for a long time. Their Ominiverse or robots platform isaac are all epxensive. Nvidia has 10x more software engineers than AMD

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

#767

Post by timr »

bitpush wrote: post #627
timr wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that Google literally spends billions to ensure that people don’t switch, right? That’s possible because they’re immensely profitable.

Isn't the billions just setting the default? The ability to switch is the same as far as I understand it.

The default is what matters.

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

#768

Post by threeducks »

rglullis wrote: post #744
HDThoreaun wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open models suck. AWS hosts them for less than closed models cost but no ones uses them, because they suck.

It's not the open models that suck, it's the infrastructure around them. None of current "open weights providers" have: - good tools for agentic workflows - no tools for context management - infrastructure for input token caching These are solvable without having to pay anything to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.

Why would the open weights providers need their own tools for agentic workflows when you can just plug their OpenAI-compatible API URL into existing tools?

Also, there are many providers of open source models with caching (Moonshot AI, Groq, DeepSeek, FireWorks AI, MiniMax): https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/best-practices/prompt-cach...

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

#769

Post by mrweasel »

nodja wrote: post #756
mrweasel wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If pre-training is just training, then how on earth can OpenAI not have "a successful pre-training run"? The word successful indicates that they tried, but failed. It might be me misunderstanding how this works, but I assumed that the training phase was fairly reproducible. You might get different results on each run, do to changes in the input, but not massively so. If OpenAI can't continuously and reliably train ne…

Because success for them doesn't mean it works, it means it works much better than what they currently have. If a 1% improvement comes at the cost of spending 10x more on training and 2x more on inference then you're failing at runs. (numbers out of ass)

That makes sense. It's not that the training didn't complete or returned a moronic model, but the capabilities have plateaued.

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

#770

Post by fzzzy »

tomrod wrote: post #755
sanjayjc wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: given LLMs' inexorable commoditization of software, how soon before NVDA's CUDA moat is breached too? Is CUDA somehow fundamentally different from other kinds of software or firmware?

Current Gen LLMs are not breaching the moat yet.

Yeah they are. llama.cpp has had good performance on cpu, amd, and apple metal for at least a year now.
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