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Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

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Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#191

Post by chaxor »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #107
tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

GPT4 sucks for many use cases because it's SLOW. It will co-exist with ChatGPT variants.

It's quite fast if you use it at ~4 AM in the US. There's definitely a cycle in time. Putting things in a queue to run while you sleep is a good work around.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#192

Post by CSMastermind »

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps).

After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap.

Just like Encarta and Wikipedia we were told - once the open source community gets their hands on something there's just no moat from an engineering perspective and once it's crowdsourced there's no moat from a data perspective. You simply can't compete.

Of course it's more than a decade later now and I still use Google Maps, Bing Maps still suck, and the view times I've tried OpenStreetMaps I've found it far behind both.

What's more every company I've worked at since has paid Google for access to their Maps API.

I guess the experience made me skeptical of people proclaiming that someone does or does not have a moat because the community will just eat away at any commercial product.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#193

Post by rosywoozlechan »

bitL wrote: post #187

Microsoft will likely acquire OpenAI at some point and will dominate AI landscape due to its corporate reach, automating away most of the MBA BS.

OpenAI is a nonprofit, it owns the for profit org that it created. It's not acquirable.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#194

Post by bilbo0s »

ilyt wrote: post #151
tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

> The point I'm wanting to make is that users will go to whoever has the best model. So, the winning strategy is whatever strategy allows your model to compound in quality faster and to continue to compound that growth in quality for longer. Best only works till second best is "close enough" and cheaper/free

It's likely they will all be free in time. That's kind of the problem underlying the consternation here.

It's the internet all over again. How do you win the race to the bottom?

Once there

How do you compete effectively with free? Microsoft and Amazon will have billions on billions coming in to float their free offerings for what is effectively eternity in business terms. Probably Google and Meta will as well. What happens to everyone else?

I think you have to be in some niche market where you can charge. Because for everyone else, free is unsustainable.

Porn maybe? But there will be way too many competitors there. So something more like medical. Or semiconductors. Or construction or something.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#195

Post by skybrian »

This gets attention due to being a leak, but it’s still just one Googler’s opinion and it has signs of being overstated for rhetorical effect.

In particular, demos aren’t the same as products. Running a demo on one person’s phone is an important milestone, but if the device overheats and/or gets throttled then it’s not really something you’d want to run on your phone.

It’s easy to claim that a problem is “solved” with a link to a demo when actually there’s more to do. People can link to projects they didn’t actually investigate. They can claim “parity” because they tried one thing and were impressed. Figuring out if something works well takes more effort. Could you write a product review, or did you just hear about it, or try it once?

I haven’t investigated most projects either so I don’t know, but consider that things may not be moving quite as fast as demo-based hype indicates.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#196

Post by com2kid »

lysecret wrote: post #67

So I use ChatGPT every day. I like it a lot and it is useful but it is overhyped. Also from 3.5 to 4 the jump was nice but seemed relatively marginal to me. I think the head start OpenAi has will vanish. Iteration will be slow and painful giving google or whoever more than enough time to catch up. ChatGPT was a fantastic leap getting us say 80% to Agi but as we have seen time and time again the last 20% are excruciat…

> So I use ChatGPT every day. I like it a lot and it is useful but it is overhyped.

It is incorrectly hyped. The vision most pundits have is horribly wrong. It is like people who thought librarians would be out of work because of ebooks, barking up the wrong tree.

ChatGPT does amazing things, but it is also prone to errors, but so are people! So what, people still get things done.

Imaging feeding ChatGPT an API for smart lights, a description of your house, and then asking it to turn on the lights in your living room. You wouldn't have to name the lights "living room", because Chat GPT knows what the hell a living room is.

Meanwhile, if I'm in my car, and I ask my phone to open Spotify, it will occasionally open Spotify on my TV back home. Admittedly it hasn't done for quite some time, I presume it may have been a bug Google fixed, but that bug only exists because Google Assistant is, well, not smart.

Here is an app you could build right now with ChatGPT:

1. Animatronics with voice boxes, expose an API with a large library of pre-canned movements and feed the API docs to ChatGPT

2. Ask ChatGPT to write a story, complete with animations and poses for each character.

3. Have ChatGPT emit code with API calls and timing for each character

4. Feed each character's lines through one of the new generation of TTS services, and once generation is done, have the play performed.

Nothing else exists that can automate things to that extent. A specialized model could do some of it, but not all of it. Maybe in the near future you can chain models together, but right now ChatGPT does it all, and it does it really well.

And ChatGPT does all sorts of cool things like that, mixing together natural language with machine parsable output (JSON, XML, or create your own format as needed!)

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#197

Post by alsodumb »

Art9681 wrote: post #106
sashank_1509 wrote: post #5

Cringe, haven’t seen a single Open Source come even close to the ability of Bard, let alone ChatGPT. Seems like wishful thinking to think decentralized open source can beat centralized models that cost 100M+ to train!

If all you’ve done is download the model and perform basic prompts then I understand why you think this. There is a lot more going on behind Bard and GPT than a chat window passing the inputs to the model. Edit for clarity: You’re comparing a platform (Bard, GPT) to a model (llama, etc). The majority of folks playing with local models are missing the platform. In order to close the gap, you need to hook up the local…

All the things you mentioned make it a platform, but even as a model, none of the smaller open-source models come close to GPT 3.5 or 4 in my experience. You can test it by using the GPT3.5 or 4 with their API. They outputs are waaaay better than anything I get from the open source models.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#198

Post by techwiz137 »

sterlind wrote: post #100
cube2222 wrote: post #83

Some snippets for folks who come just for the comments: > While our models still hold a slight edge in terms of quality, the gap is closing astonishingly quickly. Open-source models are faster, more customizable, more private, and pound-for-pound more capable. They are doing things with $100 and 13B params that we struggle with at $10M and 540B. And they are doing so in weeks, not months. > A tremendous outpouring of…

I wonder if OpenAI knew they didn't have a moat, and that's why they've been moving so fast and opening ChatGPT publicly - making the most of their lead in the short time they have left. I find it incredibly cathartic to see these massive tech companies and their gatekeepers get their lunch eaten by OSS.

Sorry for the dumb question. But in the context of the AI space, what is moat?

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#199

Post by cldellow »

hospitalJail wrote: post #171

I find it strange people are saying facebook's leak was the 'Stable Diffusion' moment for LLMs. The license is awful and basically means it can't be used in anything involving money legally. Facebook has a terrible reputation, and if they can open source their model, it would transform their reputation at least among techies. https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/184

I think the spirit of the Stable Diffusion moment comment is that there is a ton of work blossoming around LLMs, largely because there's a good base model that is now available.

And that's undeniable, IMO -- llama.cpp, vicuna are some really prominent examples. People are running language models on Raspberry Pis and smartphones. Anyone who wants to tinker can.

Now, all the stuff that's built on top of LLaMa is currently encumbered, yes.

But all of that work can likely be transferred to an unencumbered base model pretty easily. The existence of the ecosystem around LLaMa makes it much more likely that someone will create an unencumbered base model. And it seems like that is already happening, for example, the Red Pajama folks are working on this.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#200

Post by Tostino »

burnished wrote: post #170
Tostino wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, the difference between GPT4 and 3.5 is, pretty immense for what I am using it for. I can use GPT 3.5 for things like summarization tasks (as long as the text isn't too complex), reformatting, and other transformation type tasks alright. I don't even bother with using it for logical or programming tasks though.

Would you please be more explicit? I'm curious about the relative strength's and weaknesses other's see

I can use GPT 4 for to work through problems that I have not actually figured out previously by talking to co-workers who work in my industry. I need to feed it contacts for my industry explicitly within the prompt and ensure that it understands and doesn't hallucinate its answers. However, that doesn't mean it's not useful, it just means you need to you understand the limitations.
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