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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’

#131

Post by mcphage »

asadotzler wrote: post #89
kragen wrote: 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's making it sound like Altman's just following a well trod path

Well trodden and failing path. You misread the article if you considered it any endorsement of OpenAI’s plan.

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

#132

Post by sdesol »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #127
sdesol wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people may not care but that doesn't matter if the government cares. I will not be surprised if countries restrict LLMs to trusted countries in the future. Unless there is a regime change in China, seeing it adopted in other countries may be an issue.

It is a very large world though, and nationalism is more of an American shtick at the moment. It is totally possible that countries have to decide to trade with China or the USA (if they put down an infective embargo), but then it really depends on what America offers vs. China, and I don't think that is a great proposition for us.

We are definitely heading into untreaded territory. It is one thing to use Chinese EVs, but using a knowledge system that will be censored (not that other countries won't be censored) and trained in a way that may not align with a nation's beliefs is a whole different matter.

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

#133

Post by majormajor »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #127
sdesol wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people may not care but that doesn't matter if the government cares. I will not be surprised if countries restrict LLMs to trusted countries in the future. Unless there is a regime change in China, seeing it adopted in other countries may be an issue.

It is a very large world though, and nationalism is more of an American shtick at the moment. It is totally possible that countries have to decide to trade with China or the USA (if they put down an infective embargo), but then it really depends on what America offers vs. China, and I don't think that is a great proposition for us.

Nationalism is not merely having having a moment as an "American shtick", though I don't know much about how widespread it is in non-Western developing countries. Certainly might not be so much, there.

The real possibility exists that it would be better to be an independent 'second place' technology center (or third place, etc) than a pure-consumer of someone else's integrate tech stack.

China decided that a long time ago for the consumer web. Europe is considering similar things more than ever before. The US is considering it with TikTok.

It's not hard to see that expanding. It's hard to claim that forcing local development of tech was a failure for China.

Short of a breakthrough that means the everyday person no longer has to work, why would I rather have a "better" but wholly-foreign-country-owned, not-contributing-anything-to-the-economy-I-participate-in-daily LLM or image generator or what-have-you vs a locally-sourced "good enough" one?

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

#134

Post by adamnemecek »

toddmorey wrote: post #40
cs702 wrote: 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.

Spend money developing proprietary approaches to ML.

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

#135

Post by RajT88 »

kragen wrote: post #25
asadotzler wrote: post #12

Gruber's shilling some here. Andreesen et al. started over from scratch when they created Netscape. They didn't use any of the NCSA code. It was a ground up re-write. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit built and use it directly in HIS for profit enterprise. Fuck him.

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.

Well, who does Gruber usually shill for?

The question is - why would that one company want this hot take out there?

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

#136

Post by bruce511 »

cs702 wrote: 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…

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat.

Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.

There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the US). Their "moat" is in public minds here.

Google is a similar story. As is Facebook. Yes the details change, but rhe basic path is well trodden. Uber? Well the juries still out there.

Will OpenAI be the next Amazon? Will it be the next IBM? We don't know, but people are pouring billions in to find out.

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

#137

Post by chubot »

bruce511 wrote: post #136
cs702 wrote: 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…

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the…

Amazon does have a technical moat - fast shipping and warehouse operations. It’s not something that Walmart or Target can replicate easily.

Retail margins are razor thin, so the pennies of efficiency add up to a moat

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

#138

Post by tehjoker »

bruce511 wrote: post #136
cs702 wrote: 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…

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the…

Amazon's moat is their logistics network, comprehensive catalogue, prices, and value adds (like Prime Video).

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

#139

Post by dewitt »

bruce511 wrote: post #136
cs702 wrote: 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…

There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was. There's no technical moat around online sales. And lots of companies sell online. But Amazon is still the biggest (by a long long way) (at least in the…

> “Amazon might be a good analogy here. I'm old enough to remember when Amazon absorbed billions of VC money, making losses year over year. Every day there was some new article about how insane it was.”

Not to take away from the rest of your points, but I thought Amazon only raised $8m in 1995 before their IPO in 1997. Very little venture capital by today’s standard.

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