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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’

#191

Post by sdesol »

chii wrote: post #183
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.

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.

Like I've said before, this isn't a physical good that is being sold. LLM is knowledge and many governments and people are going to be concerned with how and who is packaging it. Using LLMs created by China will mean certain events in history will be omitted (which will not be exclusive to China). How the LLM responds will be dictated by the LLM training and so forth.

LLMs will become the ultimate propaganda tool (if they aren't already), and I don't see why governments wouldn't want to have full control over them.

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

#192

Post by tw1984 »

bsimpson wrote: post #169
serjester wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Android vs Apple phones in the US. HN tends to really underestimate the impact of branding and product experience. It’s hard to argue anyone’s close to OpenAI on that front (currently). Not to mention they’ve created a pretty formidable enterprise sales function. That’s the real money maker long term and outside of Google, it’s hard to imagine any of the current players outcompeting OpenAI.

Dropbox and Slack are examples of another possible outcome: capture the early adopters and stay a player in the space, but still have your lunch eaten by big tech suites that ship similar products.

this is probably how OpenAI is going to end up with. there is no clear tech barrier that can't be crossed by competitors. openai came up with all sorts of cool stuff, but almost all of them have seen a peer competitor in just months.

the recent release of deepseek v3 is a good example, o1 level model trained under 6 million USD, it pretty much beat openai by a large margin.

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

#193

Post by scarface_74 »

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 can get truckloads of items to a relatively few stores. Amazon can get items to people’s houses

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

#194

Post by scarface_74 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #172

> defensible moat … investors mistakenly thought investing in Netscape was a good way to bet on the future Yet Chrome for Google did help create a moat. A moat that’s is so strong the DoJ is investigating if Chrome should be a forced divesture from Google/Aplhabet. Note: I do generally agree with the article, but this also shows why you shouldn’t use analogies to reason.

Google was already dominant before Chrome. Why would anyone want to buy Chrome instead of just basing a browser on Chromium? How are they going to monetize it?

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

#195

Post by scarface_74 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #29
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.

What do you suppose he is shilling, and for whom? I don't know who this Gruber guy is, but it's relieving to hear at least someone talk some sense about the ludicrous levels of investment being poured into something that most users go "heh that's neat" and would never consider paying for.

Outside of Apple circles, he’s best known for the inventor of Markdown.

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

#196

Post by csomar »

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…

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

The moat is actually huge (billions of $$). What is happening is that there are people/corps/governments that are willing to burn this kind of money on compute and then give you the open weight model free of charge (or maybe with very permissive and lax licensing terms).

If it wasn't for that, there will be roughly three players in the market (Anthropic and recently Google)

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

#197

Post by int_19h »

tw1984 wrote: post #188
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

And lest we forget, China is not bothered by building as many nuclear power plants as it needs.

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

#198

Post by cm2187 »

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 as in AWS is possibly a better analogy. What AWS sells is mostly commodity. Their moat is the cost of integration. Once a company has developed all its system around AWS, they are locked in, just because of the integration cost of switching. OpenAI only sells a single component, so the lock in is weaker. But once you have a business a company depends on which has been tested and relies on OpenAI, I can see them thinking twice about switching. Right now, I doubt we are near that stage, so my vote is on no moat yet.

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

#199

Post by tw1984 »

int_19h wrote: post #197
tw1984 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

And lest we forget, China is not bothered by building as many nuclear power plants as it needs.

because Chinese is investing heavily on all sorts of renewable energies. its annual investment is more than the total US and EU amount combined.

"China is set to account for the largest share of clean energy investment in 2024 with an estimated $675 billion, while Europe is set to account for $370 billion and the United States $315 billion."

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/iea-ex...

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

#200

Post by swiftcoder »

bruce511 wrote: post #159
saurik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Moats don't have to be software. Amazon's physical distribution chain is absolutely a moat - trying to replicate their efficiency at marshalling physical items from A to B is a daunting problem for new entrants in the online retail game.
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