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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

#891
post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially, yes, they haven’t done deep software. Netflix probably comes closest amongst FAANG. Google, Meta, Amazon do “shallow and broad” software. They are quite fast at capturing new markets swiftly, they frequently repackage OpenSource core and add the large amount of business logic to make it work, but essentially follow the market cycles - they hire and layoff on a few year cycle, and the people who work ther…

You're suggesting Waymo isn't deep software? Or Tensorflow? Or Android? The Go programming language? Or MapReduce, AlphaGo, Kubernetes, the transformer, Chrome/Chromium or Gvisor? You must have an amazing CV to think these are shallow projects.

No, I just realize these for what they are - reasonable projects at the exploitation (rather than exploration) stage of any industry.

I’d say I have an average CV in the EECS world, but also relatively humble perspective of what is and isn’t bleeding edge. And as the industry expands, the volume „inside” the bleeding edge is exploitation, while the surface is the exploration.

Waymo? Maybe; but that’s acquisition and they haven’t done much deep work since. Tensorflow is a handy and very useful DSL, but one that is shallow (builds heavily on CUDA and TPUs etc); Android is another acquisition, and rather incremental growth since; Go is a nth C-like language (so neither Dennis Richie nor Bjarne Stroustrup level work); MapReduce is a darn common concept in HPC (SGI had libraries for it in the 1990s) and implementation was pretty average. AlphaGo - another acquisition, and not much deep work since; Kubernetes is a layer over Linux Namespaces to solve - well - shallow and broad problems; Chrome/Chromium is the 4th major browser that reached dominance and essentially anyone with a 1B to spare can build one.. gVisor is another thin, shallow layer.

What I mean by deep software, is a product that requires 5-10y of work before it is useful, that touches multiple layers of software stack (ideally all from hardware to application) etc. But these types of jobs are relatively rare in the 2020s software world (pretty common in robotics and new space) - they were common in the 1990s where I got my calibration values ;) Netscape and Palm Pilot was a „whoa”. Chromium and Android are evolutions.

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

#892

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few months ago, the founder was talking about "AGI" and ridiculous universal basic compute. At this point, I don't even know whom to believe. My first hand experience tells ChatGPT and even ClaudeCode are no where near the expertise they are touted to be. Yet, the marketing by these companies is so immense that you get washed away, you don't know who are agents and who are putting their true opinions.

> My first hand experience tells ChatGPT and even ClaudeCode are no where near the expertise they are touted to be Not doubting you, but where specifically have the latest models fallen short for you?

I'm unsure how someone could use LLMs regularly and not encounter significant mistakes. I use them a lot less than some devs and still run into basic errors pretty often, to the point that I rarely bother using them for niche or complicated problems even though they are pretty helpful in other cases. Just in the past few days I've had Claude trip all over itself on multiple basic tasks.

One case was asking how to do a straightforward thing with a popular open source JavaScript library, right in the sweet spot of what models should excel at. Claude's whole approach was completely broken because it relied on a hallucinated library parameter that didn't exist and didn't have an equivalent. It invented a keyword that doesn't appear in the entire open source library repo, to control functionality the library doesn't have.

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

#893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, I cannot use the top Gemini and Claude models because their outputs are so out place and hard to integrate with my code bases. The GPT 5 models integrate with my code base's existing patterns seamlessly.

Supply some relevant files of your codebase in the ClaudeAI project area in the right part of the browser. Usually it will understand your architecture, patterns, principles

I'm using AI in-editor, all the models have full access to my code base.

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

#894

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm not convinced Microsoft can do software anymore. I think they're a shambling mess of a zombie software company with enough market entropy to keep going for a long time.

The prosecution presents windows 11 as evidence that Microsoft can’t do software. Actually that’s it, that’s the entirety of the case. The prosecution rests.

Due to clerical error the frontend updates of GitHub was not part discovery so not allowed as evidence. Still, though.

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

#895
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit revisionist. Network effects were obvious when Google acquired Youtube. Google Video had the edge technically, but it didn't matter because Youtube had the users/content and Google saw that very clearly in their user growth before they made their offer.

I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already. A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.

This is why Anthropic is likely the Netscape of this era. Not OpenAI

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

#896
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about it having the edge, I thought Google video had a worse interface between them at the time. But that point feels eerily relevant anyway: a lot of normal people I see don't care if Claude/Gemini/etc are better models technically, they're comfortable with ChatGPT already. A lot of YT's growth at the time was word of mouth and brand among the population, which is currently ChatGPT's position.

ChatGPT is losing their brand positioning to Google, Anthropic, and Chinese Open Source Altman knows this and why he called code red. If OpenAI hasn't produce a fully new model in 1.5 years, how much longer can they hang on before people will turn to alternatives that are technically better? How long before they could feasibly put out a new model if they are having issues in pre-training?

Do you have any proof of this?

Still feels like ChatGPT is synonymous with the current wave of generative ai

Even if they aren’t the market lead and it’s main offering is being commodified

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

#897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Altman's main interest is Altman. ChatGPT will be acquihired, most people will be let go, the brand will become a shadow of its former self, and Altman will emerge with a major payday and no obvious dent in his self-made reputation as a leading AGIthinkfluenceretc. I don't think ads are that easy, because the hard part of ads isn't taking money and serving up ad slop, it's providing convincing tracking and analytics.…

And Blockbuster will acquire Netflix

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

#898
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added. At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than…

Minor difference : YT does not cost literally a human trip to Mars and back to operate

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

#899
post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did say the same thing about Youtube, which was unprofitable and extremely expensive to run in the early years. I remember thinking everyone would leave once ads were added. At youtube's ad income rate (~$13/year), the current (but growing) ~800 million chatgpt users would add ~$10 billion. At facebook's rate (~$40-50/year) $32-40 billion. Potentially, an assistant would be more integrated into your life than…

Minor difference : YT does not cost literally a human trip to Mars and back to operate

It also didn't generate billions in income before even adding ads^1, nor grow anywhere near as quickly. ChatGPT is larger on most axes.

YouTube was ambitious for its time. "In 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had in 2000" but they weren't believed to start breaking even until 2015.

^1 and free users are a large majority!

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

#900
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $

FWIW the selling $1 for $0.2 is widely applied to any business that is selling goods below cost. For example: free shipping at Amazon does not have resale value and is not obviously fungible, but everyone understands they are eating a cost that otherwise would be borne by their customers. The suggestion is that OpenAI is doing similar, though it is harder to tease out because their books are opaque.

Can you explain why Amazon eats the cost of shipping? Are they like the "First CityWide Change Bank"? How do they make money? Answer: Volume.
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