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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’

#181

Post by antics »

sausagefeet wrote: post #178
lotsofpulp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 has been a tech company since the 80s. The way Walmart got so big is that the created a literal network between stores so they could do logistics at scale. They had the largest database at the time. Walmart is still the largest company in the world by revenue, with Amazon at its heels, with Amazon's profit beating out Walmart's. A lot of this thread, I think, is just fantasy land that Amazon is somehow: 1. De…

Just to emphasize this point: Walmart was to the IT revolution what Amazon is to the Internet revolution. They were among the first in the sector to move beyond paper and industrialize IT for operations, which allowed them to scale way faster and way more efficiently than their competition. Walmart's most powerful executives were IT executives, and many of them went on to have very decorated careers, e.g., Kevin Turner was the CIO immediately prior to becoming COO at Microsoft.

Walmart is not an Internet company. It is definitely a tech company. It's just that its tech is no longer super cool.

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

#182

Post by chrisvalleybay »

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…

There's still one thing missing here: the browser. I do not agree with Gruber's analogy that the LLM is the browser. The interface to the LLM is the browser. We have seen some attempts at creating good browsers for LLM but we do not have NetScape, IE/Edge, Chrome, FF, Brave yet. Once we do, you would very easily be jumping between these models, and even letting the browser pick a model for you based on the type of question.

Also companies will be (and are) bundling these subscriptions for you, like Raycast AI, where you pay one monthly sum and get access to «all major models».

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

#183

Post by chii »

sdesol wrote: post #116
callc wrote: 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.

Making something illegal isn't gonna work if there's clearly value in doing it, and isn't actually harmful. Regulatory unfairness is easily discerned.

Look at how competitive chinese EVs are, and no amount of tarriffs are gonna stop them from dominating the market - even if americans prevent their own market from being dominated, all of their allies will not be able to stop their own.

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

#184

Post by sdesol »

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…

> 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

It is widely understood that you really can't compete with "as good as". People won't leave Google, Facebook, etc. if you can only provide a service as good as, because the effort required to move would not be worth it.

> if you show me a product that works just as well as ChatGPT but costs less--or which costs the same but works a bit better--I would use it

This is why I believe LLMs will become a commodity product. The friction to leave one service is nowhere near as as great as leaving a social network. LLMs in their current state are very much interchangeable. OpenAI will need a technological breakthrough in reliability and/or cost to get people to realize that leaving OpenAI makes no sense.

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

#185

Post by chii »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119
sdesol wrote: 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…

> They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10 or 20 years

i dont believe they're as behind as many analysis deems. In fact, making it illegal to export western chips to china only serves to cause the mother of all inventions, necessity, to pressure harder and make it work.

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

#186

Post by Nasrudith »

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…

I guess that explains all of the 'our product is an existential threat' chuunibyou bullshit. Trying to get a regulatory moat instead.

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

#187

Post by chrisvalleybay »

Jyaif wrote: post #53
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.

> curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI By knowing a lot about me, like the details of my relationships, my interests, my work. The LLM would then be able to be better function than the other LLMs. OpenAI already made steps in that direction by learning facts about you. By offering services only possible by integrating with other industries, like restaurants, banks, etc... This take years to d…

It is better to leave this up to the «LLM browser», than the LLM. Both because of privacy and portability.

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

#188

Post by tw1984 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119
sdesol wrote: 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…

> 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).

You don't need the most efficient chips to train LLMs. those much slower chips (e.g. those made by Huawei) will probably take longer for training and they waste more electricity and space. but so what?

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

#189

Post by discordance »

trhway wrote: post #46
kridsdale1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effects are a moat. A vertically integrated system that people depend on with non-portable integrations is a moat. Regulatory Capture is a moat.

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

muscle memory

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

#190

Post by scarface_74 »

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 spent those billions on warehouses, server, its own delivery network, etc.

Anyone can sell online. But not just anyone has those advantages like same day abs next day shipping

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