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OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

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Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#101

Post by MoreMoore »

ninth_ant wrote: post #41
neals wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the moat idea. But are there really any moats? What's a good moat these days anyway? Isn't being first and "really good" fine as well?

The Network effect, and cultural mind share are two pretty effective moats. Meta and X proven surprisingly resilient in the face of pretty overwhelming negative sentiment. Google maintains monopoly status on Web Search and in Browsers despite not being remarkably better than competition. Microsoft remains overwhelmingly dominant in the OS market despite having a deeply flawed product. Amazon sells well despite a prol…

Steam isn't trivially replaceable. What are you talking about? No other platform matches them on feature set.

Amazon also has a significant advantage in its logistics that underpin their entire business across the globe and that nobody else can match.

You're also wrong about how Google maintains its monopoly, or Microsoft.

All I see is bias and an unwillingness to understand, well, any of the relevant topics.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#102

Post by patrickhogan1 »

lesuorac wrote: post #33
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #20

I agree that at its current rate of $20 per month and continuous cash burn, OpenAI’s model doesn’t seem sustainable. But the same could have been said about Google in its early days. Back then, Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability—until it figured out how to monetize. Similarly, OpenAI will likely release more products to generate revenue. OpenAI has the potential to create the…

> Back then, Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability [citation needed] Google's goal was always advertising just like every other search engine.

Please read the academic paper by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, available at this link:

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2019/10/28/the-academic-p...

You might find their perspective on advertising surprising.

Returning to my earlier point, please expand your argument about why OpenAI may fail. Let’s aim to elevate the discussion.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#103

Post by patrickhogan1 »

VHRanger wrote: post #27
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #20

I agree that at its current rate of $20 per month and continuous cash burn, OpenAI’s model doesn’t seem sustainable. But the same could have been said about Google in its early days. Back then, Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability—until it figured out how to monetize. Similarly, OpenAI will likely release more products to generate revenue. OpenAI has the potential to create the…

> Google spent heavily to index websites without a clear path to profitability Uh, they were advertising in 1999 already?

Please read the academic paper by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, available at this link: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2019/10/28/the-academic-p...

You might find their perspective on advertising surprising.

Returning to my earlier point, please expand your argument about why OpenAI may fail. Let’s aim to elevate the discussion.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#104

Post by skydhash »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #97
skydhash wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital data are only a tiny part of the influx of information that people interact with. It's the same error platforms made with releasing movies straight to their services. Yes, people watch more movies at home, but going to cinemas is a whole experience that encompasses more than just watching a movie. Yes, books are great, but traveling and tutoring is much more impactful.

Sorry, what does that have to do with an OpenAI tech moat?

>>> The company that captures the most human-AI interaction data will have a TREMENDOUS moat.

>> When the big companies say they're running out of data, I think they mean it literally. They have hoovered up everything external and internal and are now facing the overwhelming mediocrity that synthetic data provides.

> Digital data are only a tiny part of the influx of information that people interact with.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#105

Post by wmf »

asadotzler wrote: post #95
wmf wrote: post #30

I see some people talking about OpenAI "stealing" IP from the nonprofit side, but remember that they went "capped profit" back in 2019. It's possible that GPT-3 and later were developed entirely by the capped-profit side anyway. I doubt there's much if any pre-2019 IP left.

Did they license and pay for all of the non-profit work they utilized in GPT-3? OR are you claiming it was a clean-room re-write? I think you're pretty naive if you think the latter happened.

I think they could have done just enough of both to plausibly neutralize Elon's lawsuit.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#106

Post by jhanschoo »

aoeusnth1 wrote: post #93
jhanschoo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does AGI even mean in this case? If progress toward more capable and more cost-effective agents is incremental, I don't see a defensible moat. (You can maintain a moat given continued outpaced investment, but following remains more cost-effective)

Since we're talking about the economic impact here, AGI(X) could be defined as being able to do X% of white collar jobs independently with about as much oversight as a human worker would need. The exponential gains would come from increasing penetration into existing labor forces and industrial applications. The first arriver would have an advantage in being the first to be profitably and practically applicable to wh…

Why would the gains be exponential? Assume that X "first arrival" develops a model with a certain rnd investment, and Y arrives next year with investment that's an order of magnitude less costly by following, and there's a simple enough switchover for customers. That's what's meant by no defensible moat; a counterexample is Google up to 2022 where for more than a decade nothing else came close in value prop. Maybe X now has an even better model with more investment, but Y is good enough and can charge way less even if their models are less cost-effective.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#107

Post by Ekaros »

brookst wrote: post #84
trhway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the moat of the Google Search? To me the LLM is the first and the only disruptor so far of the Search.

Google’s moat is eroding (filling?), but over the years it shifted from best product/tech to best brand.

Google is still good enough for most searches. Say finding web page of restaurant or some cursory information on popular topic.

I suppose competitor would have to be really good on those times most users need something better.

So it is the brand and familiarity. It would need to get really bad even on most basic things to be replaced.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#108

Post by [deleted] »

andrewflnr wrote: post #52
trhway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the moat of the Google Search? To me the LLM is the first and the only disruptor so far of the Search.

It used to be their high search quality, difficult to replicate technology. Now they don't have one.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#109

Post by manbart »

scarmig wrote: post #48
toddmorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

1) Push for regulations around data provenance. If you train on anything, you have to prove that you had the rights to train on it. This would kill all but the largest providers in the USA, though China would still pose a problem. You could work around that bit by making businesses and consumers liable for usage of models that don't have proof of provenance. 2) If you had some secret algorithm that substantially outp…

I'm pretty sure 3) is Meta's strategy currently

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#110

Post by pas »

jsheard wrote: post #88
brookst wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why do they pay to license so much content? And you can’t really be suggesting that public domain should exclude AI training?

That's a good question, why do they choose to pay for certain content while also continuing to insist that all publicly available content should be fair game? It's an incoherent stance, and the only plausible explanation I can come up with is that those "licensing deals" are out-of-court legal settlements in a trenchcoat.

It's understandable that they don't have the luxury of consistency. They make deals to reduce risks. (It's usually not a great business decision to sue someone who is paying you a lot of money, even if in theory the court could order them to pay more. But how long? Also there are already lawsuits ongoing. Maybe they want to get those dropped?)
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