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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’

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure how you'd get that non-digital data, though. Fundamentally that sounds like a process that doesn't scale to tbe level that they need. Can you explain more?

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

#112
post #85
post #63

Correction: all they need to succeed is unimaginable sums of money and the ironclad right to assimilate every work ever created by humanity without compensation. Who could refuse such a modest request? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...

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

To sell the illusion of not using copyrighted works they make it publicly aware that they license some works.

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

#113
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who and what do you think Gruber is shilling for? I don't see Gruber saying anything that might tempt anyone to part from some of their money. He seems to be doing the diametrical opposite of shilling.

The "Silicon Valley can do no bad" crowd. He's making it sound like Altman's just following a well trod path here when they're clearly doing something novel and actually quite evil.

He calls investing in OpenAI "wishful thinking" and a "Ponzi scheme", and as I read it, he's also criticizing the thing you're criticizing, though somewhat less harshly. He just seems to be under the mistaken impression that Mosaic Communications Corporation was a licensee of Mosaic like Spry was, which, well, you can see how that misunderstanding could have arisen.

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

#115
post #56
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> China would still pose a problem Not if regulation prohibits LLMs from China, which isn't that far fetched to be honest. I think LLM will turn into a commodity product and if you want to dominate with a commodity product, you need to provide twice the value at half the cost. Open AI will need a breakthrough in reliability and/or inference cost to really create a moat.

If US regulation prohibits China from training LLMs? How?

If you mean trying to stop GPUs getting to China, US already has tried that with specific GPU models, but China still gets them.

Seems hard/impossible to do. Even if US and CCP were trying to stop Chinese citizens and companies doing LLM stuff

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

#116
post #115
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China would still pose a problem Not if regulation prohibits LLMs from China, which isn't that far fetched to be honest. I think LLM will turn into a commodity product and if you want to dominate with a commodity product, you need to provide twice the value at half the cost. Open AI will need a breakthrough in reliability and/or inference cost to really create a moat.

If US regulation prohibits China from training LLMs? How? If you mean trying to stop GPUs getting to China, US already has tried that with specific GPU models, but China still gets them. Seems hard/impossible to do. Even if US and CCP were trying to stop Chinese citizens and companies doing LLM stuff

Not prohibit training, but make it illegal for US companies to embed, use or distribute LLMs created by China. Basically the general consumer will need to go through the effort of use the LLM that they want, which we know means only a small fraction of people.

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

#117
post #69

OpenAI's engineers: brilliant, A+, A* even. OpenAI's C-suite: Well, they earned the C, but it was a letter grade. What a profoundly unimaginative strategy. No matter the industry, a large-scale diversion of resources towards a moonshot goal will likely get you to that goal. They haven't made an argument as to why we should do that just for them, especially with all of the other alternatives. And no, advertising your…

> OpenAI's engineers: brilliant, A+, A* even. Then why do they look about average to Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, and many others of that cohort despite having x100 the amount of resources?

[deleted]

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

#118
post #21

This rings true to my ears: > There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly…

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.

Create closed source models that are much better than the other ones, don't publish your tricks to obtaining your results, and then lock them down in a box that can't be tampered with? I hope it doesn't go that way.

Alternatively, a model that takes a year and the output of a nuclear power plant to train (and then you can tell them about your tricks, since they aren't very reproducible).

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

#119
post #116
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If US regulation prohibits China from training LLMs? How? If you mean trying to stop GPUs getting to China, US already has tried that with specific GPU models, but China still gets them. Seems hard/impossible to do. Even if US and CCP were trying to stop Chinese citizens and companies doing LLM stuff

Not prohibit training, but make it illegal for US companies to embed, use or distribute LLMs created by China. Basically the general consumer will need to go through the effort of use the LLM that they want, which we know means only a small fraction of people.

That assumes that only the US is interested in using LLMs commercially, which isn't really true. Even if you can get America to sanction Chinese LLM use, you aren't even going to American allies to go along with that, let alone everyone else.

China's biggest challenge ATM is that they do not yet economically produce the GPUs and RAM needed to train and use big models. They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10 or 20 years (they can make fast chips, they can make cheap chips, they can't yet make fast cheap chips).

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

#120
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not prohibit training, but make it illegal for US companies to embed, use or distribute LLMs created by China. Basically the general consumer will need to go through the effort of use the LLM that they want, which we know means only a small fraction of people.

That assumes that only the US is interested in using LLMs commercially, which isn't really true. Even if you can get America to sanction Chinese LLM use, you aren't even going to American allies to go along with that, let alone everyone else. China's biggest challenge ATM is that they do not yet economically produce the GPUs and RAM needed to train and use big models. They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10…

Canada would be reluctant. So would Europe, South Asia and so forth. The biggest hurdle for China is the CCP. It is one thing to use physical products from China but relying on the CCP for knowledge may be a step too far for many nations.
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