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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’

#151

Post by Jensson »

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…

> The exponential gains would come from increasing penetration into existing labor forces and industrial applications

Only if they are much cheaper than the equivalent work done by humans, but likely the first AGI will be way more expensive than humans.

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

#152

Post by barnabyjones »

shalmanese wrote: post #123
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.

In the early days of Google, people believed there could be absolutely no moat in search because competition was just "one click away" and even Google believed this and deeply internalized this into their culture of technological dominance as the only path to survival. At the beginning of ride sharing, people believed there was absolutely no geographical moat and all riders were just one cheaper ride from switching s…

It is really unbelievable how much money companies will spend to avoid talking to and thoroughly understanding their users. OpenAI could probably learn a lot from interviewing 200 random people every 6 months and seeing what they use and why, but my guess is they would consider that frivolous.

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

#153

Post by svnt »

saurik wrote: post #149
bruce511 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. Tha…

Amazon functions as a marketplace dynamic, which is defensible if done right, as they have shown.

OpenAI right now some novel combination of a worker bee and queryable encyclopedia. If they are trying to make a marketplace argument for this, it would be based on their data sources, which may have a similar sort of first-mover advantage as a marketplace as they get closed off and become more expensive (see eg reddit api twitter api changes), except that much of those data age out, in a way that sellers and buyers in a marketplace do not.

The other big difference with a marketplace is constrained attention on the sell/fulfillment side. Data brokers do not have this constraint — data is easier to self-distribute and infinitely replicable.

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

#154

Post by Jensson »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #38
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.

There is no profit yet...

But they are expected to make profits in the future, that is what investments into for-profits are for.

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

#155

Post by svnt »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #146
bruce511 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. When was this true? Amazon was founded Jul 1994, and a publicly listed company by May 1997. I highly doubt Amazon absorbed billions of dollars of VC money in less than 3 years of the mid 1990s. https://dazeinfo.com/2019…

They were run as a very unprofitable publicly traded company for a very long time — investor, VC, parent probably just went for some rough metonymy.

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

#156

Post by selimthegrim »

throwup238 wrote: post #80
dartos wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that would matter if they could find the holy grail though.

Every time a new model comes out I ask it to locate El Dorado or Shangri-La for me. That’s my criteria for AGI/ASI. Alas I am still without my mythical city of gold.

Somebody is going to write Wizard of Oz for all this and I’m for it.

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

#157

Post by tempodox »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #77
janice1999 wrote: post #7

Where is all the money going? Nvidia hardware?

IP Lawyers and Nuclear Lobbyists, presumably

Not to mention all the spin doctors they need to conjure up a regulatory moat in absence of a technical one.

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

#158

Post by motoxpro »

bravura wrote: post #35

People keep saying stuff like this, but I don't believe it: "There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble." AI progress is driven by strong valuable data. Detailed important conversation with a chatbot are much more valuable that quick search queries. As LLMs extend past web UIs, there is even more interaction data to capture and learn from. The company that capture…

When will this come to pass? OpenAI has many orders of magnitude more conversational data and Anthropic just keeps catching up. Until there is some evidence (OpenAI winning, or Google winning rather than Open Source catching up), I don't belive this is true.

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

#159

Post by bruce511 »

saurik wrote: post #149
bruce511 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A couple other comments touch on the point I want to make, but I feel they don't nail it hard enough: if today you told me you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money, you'd still have no products... as a user I'd have no reason to go there, but then without users there is no reason to sell there, so you have a circular bootstrapping issue. Tha…

I feel like you (and others) are saying what I'm saying.

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

Meaning that just because the moat is not technical doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Clearly Amazon, Google, Facebook etc have moats, but they are not "better software". They found other things to act as the moat (distribution, branding, network effects).

OpenAI will need to find a different moat than just software. And I agree with all the people in this part if the thread driving that point home.

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

#160

Post by chubot »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #148
chubot wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Walmart and Target have tons of warehouse expertise. Amazon’s moat is their software, where they have a far longer head start and they can afford to pay their employees due to AWS and other services’ high margins, as well as executing well on growth resulting in being able to compensate with equity. Walmart and Target were far better than Amazon at logistics at the beginning, but they couldn’t execute (or didn’t focu…

Walmart and Target already had warehouses, but the end-to-end system you need for 2-day, 1-day, same day shipping, which includes warehouses/trucks/drivers, is not something they had

They were built for people to come to their store, and the website was a second class citizen for a long time.

But that was Amazon's bread and butter. They built that fast-shipping moat as a pretty established company, and the big retailers were caught off guard

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