Just a heads-up. I'm interested in your online workshop link, but it's private.
AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
11–20 of 210 posts
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine not understanding that their main way of doing money is through their API for other companies, and not through a product. They are focused on doing something they are good: good AI models, they let other companies take the risk to build product on top of it, and reap benefits from theses products. There is no moat in an API-gated foundation model. One LLM is as good as any other, and it'll be a race to the…
> LLMs and foundation models are fungible and easy. The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history. If what you're claiming were true, it wouldn't cost so much for Meta and OpenAI to do their models, and it wouldn't take trillion dollar corporations as sponsors to make it all wor…
Sort of like railroads, a super simple product, but insanely expensive to build a network at scale except for those who already have.
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine not understanding that their main way of doing money is through their API for other companies, and not through a product. They are focused on doing something they are good: good AI models, they let other companies take the risk to build product on top of it, and reap benefits from theses products. There is no moat in an API-gated foundation model. One LLM is as good as any other, and it'll be a race to the…
> LLMs and foundation models are fungible and easy. The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history. If what you're claiming were true, it wouldn't cost so much for Meta and OpenAI to do their models, and it wouldn't take trillion dollar corporations as sponsors to make it all wor…
> The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history.
I disagree. The more we learn about LLMs the more it appears that they're not as difficult to build as it initially seemed.
You need a lot of GPUs and electricity, so you need money, but the core ideas: dump in a ton of pre-training data, then run layers of instruction tuning on top - are straight-forward enough that there are already 4-5 organizations that are capable of training GPT-4 class LLMs - and it's still a pretty young field.
Compared to human endeavors like the Apollo project LLMs are pretty small fry.
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#14[flagged]
> Imagine not understanding that their main way of doing money is through their API for other companies, and not through a product.
Or, more to the point: Their primary product is B2B, not B2C.
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine not understanding that their main way of doing money is through their API for other companies, and not through a product. They are focused on doing something they are good: good AI models, they let other companies take the risk to build product on top of it, and reap benefits from theses products. There is no moat in an API-gated foundation model. One LLM is as good as any other, and it'll be a race to the…
> LLMs and foundation models are fungible and easy. The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history. If what you're claiming were true, it wouldn't cost so much for Meta and OpenAI to do their models, and it wouldn't take trillion dollar corporations as sponsors to make it all wor…
Mistral AI has released their updated Mistral Large model and it gets basically the same scores on the chatbot arena leaderboard as a GPT4 version from the end of 2023.
OpenAI has to constantly keep moving and improving their models with zero forgiveness for any complacency and so far they have only achieved less a lead of less than a year versus an underfunded competitor.
Meanwhile Anthropic and Google are managing to build commercial models that are on par with GPT-4.
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#16I guess they've worked out making money is an important part of any business?
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine not understanding that their main way of doing money is through their API for other companies, and not through a product. They are focused on doing something they are good: good AI models, they let other companies take the risk to build product on top of it, and reap benefits from theses products. There is no moat in an API-gated foundation model. One LLM is as good as any other, and it'll be a race to the…
> LLMs and foundation models are fungible and easy. The top couple LLMs are extraordinarily expensive - will get dramatically more expensive yet - and are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history. If what you're claiming were true, it wouldn't cost so much for Meta and OpenAI to do their models, and it wouldn't take trillion dollar corporations as sponsors to make it all wor…
> [Large Language Models] are one of the most challenging products that have been created in all of human history.
That statement seems, er... hyperbolically grandiose.
Are there examples of other products which you think are similarly "challenging" to create?
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#18Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#19[flagged]
Their numbers aren't public, but I'm not 100% certain that they're making significantly more money through the API than they are through paid subscribers to their products. They have a LOT of paid subscribers, and they're signing big "enterprise" deals with companies that have thousands of seats.
How do you know they have a lot of paid subscribers if their numbers aren't public?
I'd guess that outside of a core "fanbase" / early adopter type they don't have that many subscribers.
Re: AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
#20[flagged]
And at release ChatGPT was meant as a marketing gimmick. A fun way to interact with a slightly finetuned version of GPT3.5 to showcase how good their models had become.
If anything it's remarkable how much they leaned into this success, building an iOS and Android app, speeding up the models, adding a premium plan, lots of new features, and eventually deprecating their text-completion mode and going all in on chat as the interaction mode for their LLMs.