Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…
I think software patents in AI are a possibility. The transformer was patented after all, with way it was bypassed being the decoder-only models.
Secrecy is also possible, and I'm sure there's a whole lot of that.
Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…
He has no answer for it so the only thing he can do is deflect and turn on the $2T reality distortion field.
So is the translation endless scaling has stopped being as effective?
The translation is that SSI says that SSIs strategy is the way forward so could investors please stop giving OpenAI money and give SSI the money instead. SSI has not shown anything yet, nor does SSI intend to show anything until they have created an actual Machine God, but SSI says they can pull it off so it's all good to go ahead and wire the GDP of Norway directly to Ilya.
How did Dwarkesh manage to build a brand that can attract famous people to his podcast? He didn’t have prior fame from something else in research or business, right? Curious if anyone knows his growth strategy to get here.
Seems like he’s Lex without the Rogan association so hardcore liberal folks can listen without having to buy morality offsets. He’s good, and he’s filling a void in an established underserved genre is my take.
Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…
He's just doing research with some grant money? Why would you ask a researcher for a path to profitability?
I just hope the people funding his company are aware that they gave some grant money to some researchers.
Translation: Free lunch of getting results just by throwing money at the problem is over. Now for the first time in years we actually need to think what we are doing and firgure out why things that work, do work.
Somehow, despite being vastly overpaid I think AI researchers will turn out to be deeply inadequate for the task. As they have been during the last few AI winters.
The impactful innovations in AI these days aren't really from scaling models to be larger. It's more concrete to show higher benchmark scores, and this implies higher intelligence, but this higher intelligence doesn't necessarily translate to all users feeling like the model has significantly improved for their use case. Models sometimes still struggle with simple questions like counting letters in a word, and most people don't have a use case of a model needing phd level research ability.
Research now matters more than scaling when research can fix limitations that scaling alone can't. I'd also argue that we're in the age of product where the integration of product and models play a major role in what they can do combined.
Even as criticism targets major model providers, his inability to answer clearly about revenue & dismissing it as a future concern reveals a great deal about today's market. It's remarkable how effortlessly he, Mira, and others secure billions, confident they can thrive in such an intensely competitive field. Without a moat defined by massive user bases, computing resources, or data, any breakthrough your researchers…
Mira was a PM who somehow was at the right place at the right time. She isn’t actually an AI expert. Ilya however, is. I find him to be more credible and deserving in terms of research investment. That said, I agree that revenue is important and he will need a good partner (another company maybe) to turn ideas into revenue at some point. But maybe the big players like Google will just acquire them on no revenue to ge…
That’s kind of a shitty way to put it. Mira wasn’t a PM at OpenAI. She was CTO and before that VP of Engineering. Prior to OpenAI she was an engineer at Tesla on the Model X and Leap Motion.
You’re right that she’s not a published ML researcher like Ilya, but "right place, right time" undersells leading the team that shipped ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4.