Live data from Hacker News

It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

stratechery.com

161–170 of 284 posts

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#161

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

OpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars.

They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#162
post #94
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces. The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql at your o…

The current LLMs support data export/import inherently because the interface is pure text. All one needs to do is say something like “tell me all of personalization factors you have on me” and then just copy and paste that into the next LLM with “here’s stuff you should know about how to personalize output for me”

[deleted]

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#163

I wonder if OpenAI's app platform is going to be more like Windows (most economic value goes to user and app partners) or like Facebook (most economic value goes to facebook, app makers get screwed. I mean Microsoft acted badly towards a lot of partners, but it was a true platform.

Or like Apple. Mix of both, except they take the best ideas and bring them in house (and occasionally use proprietary APIs to do things others can’t)

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#164
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.

Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.

I don't think he fundamentally gets what's going on with AI on the tech level and how the Moore's law type improvements in compute have driven this and will keep doing so. He just kind of sees that LLM chatbots are not much good and assumes things will stay like that. If that were so investing $1tn would make no sense. But it's not true.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#165
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homelessness and world hunger are not bottlenecked by money. There's a stronger case for healthcare, but that's also substantially a political issue.

There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

With a little bit of lag time (school) we could have a metric fuckton of doctors. We have a metric fuckton of shitty lawyers. Doctors are artificially gated in the US

What’s the joke? “What do you call the person who graduated last in their class from med school? A doctor.”

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#166
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a stronger case for world hunger being bottlenecked than healthcare. World hunger is a logistics problem now, but no amount of money lets you print doctors.

Actually funding education via wealth distribution is a great way of ”printing doctors”.

I don't know what wealth distribution means in this context, or why it's relevant at all, but food grows fast and doctors take like 20 years to grow no matter how much money you throw at it or where you get the money. And the context above was more specifically "fully pay health care costs" which is a comical fantasy the moment you try to actually define what that means, because the limit is not the price.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#167
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of the value I get from ChatGPT is based on it's memory system that has a good profile on me. For example if I ask it to find me something to eat at X restaurant, it will already know my allergies, dietary preferences, weight goals, medications, other foods I like, etc and suggest an item based on that, all workout me explicitly telling it. Moving from ChatGPT to Claude I would lose a lot of this valuable histor…

Or you could type up "My allergies are X, Y, Z, I have the following preferences..." etc. and put it into whatever chat bot you like. Obviously this is a bit of a pain, but it probably constrains significantly how much of a premium ChatGPT can charge. You might not bother if ChatGPT is time and a half more expensive, but what if it's 3x as much as the competition? What if there's a free alternative that's just as goo…

> Or you could type up "My allergies are X, Y, Z, I have the following preferences..."

Why use a car when you can just walk?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#168

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

OpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars. They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!

Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor.

I easily see the rich betting a trillion dollars especially if it's not their money and they start employing government funds in the name of a fictitious AI arms race.

They smell blood in the water. Reducing everyone to as minimum wage as possible.

Capital is already concentrated, aligned along monopolies and cartels, oligarchical control, and AI is the final key to total control to whatever degree they desire.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked 99% of normies are still happily scrolling FB and Instagram

FB in particular is becoming deader and deader every month, and it's only a matter of time before something else comes along that sucks their attention away.

The beauty of Meta is that they can just fake engagement metrics. Not defending them, just knowing that they do

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#170

OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately. One URL replacement away and you can switch most models in minutes. I have personally done this many times over the last year and a half. It only takes labs to produce better and better models, and the race to bottom on token costs.

> OpenAI doesn't have a moat unfortunately.

The moat is the branding, for most people AI means ChatGpt.

Post reply on HN