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

Post by andybak » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 11:53 AM UTC

findjashua wrote: post #384

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…

NME at all - 5.1 codex has been the best by far.

Post by tim333 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 11:55 AM UTC

barrell wrote: post #773

nbardy wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is misleading. They had 4.5 which was a new scaled up training run. It was a huge model and only served to pro users, but the biggest models are always used as teacher models for smaller models. Thats how you do distillation. It would be stupid to not use the biggest model you have in distillation and a waste since they have the weights. The would have taken some time to calculate the efficiency gains of pretrai…

My understanding of 4.5 was that it was released long, long after the initial training run finished. It also had an older cutoff date than the newer 4o models

Post by sumedh » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 11:59 AM UTC

anileated wrote: post #310

vivzkestrel wrote: post #44

In one of the Indian movies, there is a rather funny line that goes like this "tu jiss school se padh kar aaya hai mein uss school ka headmaster hoon". It would translate like this "The school from which you studied and came? I am the principal of that school". Looks like Google is about to show who the true principal is

Probably all of the ML foundation like transformers which OpenAI used to create its chatbot was originally developed at Google.

Post by cmiles8 » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:02 PM UTC

zurfer wrote: post #780

cmiles8 wrote: post #136

The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here. Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time. Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.

It drives me a bit crazy when people say OpenAI has no moat. Yes, companies like Google can catch up and overtake them, but a moat is merely making it hard and expensive. 99.999.. perc of companies can't dream of competing with OpenAI.

Post by HDThoreaun » Wed, Dec 03, 2025, 12:05 PM UTC

NBJack wrote: post #733

HDThoreaun wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inference is profitable for openai as far as I can tell. They dont need to jack up prices much, what they really need is users who are paying/consuming ads. Theyre burning money on free tier users and data center expansion so they can serve more users.

This assumes your model is static and never needs to be improved or updated. Inference is cheap because the final model, despite its size, is ridiculously less resource intensive to use than it is to produce. ChatGPT in its latest form isn't bad by any means, but it is falling behind. And that requires significant overhead, both to train and to iterate on model architecture. It is often a variable cost as well.