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You can't build a moat with AI

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21–30 of 49 posts

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#21

This is probably why Google or Meta will "win" over OpenAI in the end. They have all the data, and no one else even comes close.

Microsoft has plenty of data too. In Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn posts and messages, and Outlook emails.

Don't forget they have github as well.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#22
...which is why OpenAI is focusing more on enterprise sales and unique value-propositions such as the GPT Store which can't trivially be imitated by competitors.

This post seems to misunderstand what a "moat" is in a business sense (and unfortunately a lot of AI hypesters on social media do as well). The fact that LLMs are becoming a commodity was the point of the original "OpenAI has no moat" memo by Google, which has proven to be accurate.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#25
"It might feel like your applications’ prompts or prompt templates are a good form of differentiation. After all, your top-notch engineering team has invested days into tuning them to have the right response characteristics, tone, and output style. Of course, giving your competitors your prompts would probably accelerate their progress, but any good engineering team will figure out the right changes quickly. The main reason is that the experimentation (with the right evaluation data!) is quick and easy — trying a new prompt template isn’t much harder than writing it out. All it really takes is a little bit of patience, some creativity, and extra Azure OpenAI credits."

And yet, over and over, I see products with output that clearly comes from simple and frankly lazy prompting. You can do a lot with prompting, but engineerings are not putting in the work! (If an engineer is even the right person... probably not, given any specific application of an LLM.)

Prompting also isn't so reductive that you just write an evaluation and then iterate on the prompt until you satisfy the evaluation. Prompting is a co-creative exercise between the LLM, the domain expert, the product, and the user. And sure "data" fits in there, as well as relationships, comprehensibility, workflows, etc etc... the AI component is just a small piece of any full application.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#26
post #4

> We firmly believe the moat for AI application is in the data and the data engineering today. At some point, the process of building custom LLMs might get so fast and easy that we’ll all return to building our own models. That simply isn’t the case today. Customized small models will outperform larger general models for your specific use case.

No they wont. Any model you train now will be beat by GPT5 easily

Not for most human language, or anything that requires business-specific context where what's publicly available lags behind the state of the art your business cares about.

And of course, not if you care about token throughput more than fancy abilities. Or price for that matter.

So for many if not most businesses needs GPT-4 isn't the best tool out there, and GPT-5 is the canonical example of a vaporware right now.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real power of customized small models will be running things on local hardware, except that we're in an awkward phase where the local hardware isn't quite beefy enough to run anything really useful yet. Maybe Apple will do something interesting in that space at WWDC.

Also not feasible. A network request to groq type machines will outperform your local hardware by such a huge amount that it wont make sense other than some very niche tasks

Network availability, latency, privacy, etc. many qualities to consider beyond model size and performance for applications.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not feasible. A network request to groq type machines will outperform your local hardware by such a huge amount that it wont make sense other than some very niche tasks

Network availability, latency, privacy, etc. many qualities to consider beyond model size and performance for applications.

And cost-efficiency, if I'm using an LLM as an Siri-like assistant on my phone, most of the tasks I'll want it to do won't be that complicated and it would be a waste to send them to some SOTA LLM in the cloud, which I'll have to pay for by a monthly subscription or on a per-token basis.

Re: You can't build a moat with AI

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the real power of customized small models will be running things on local hardware, except that we're in an awkward phase where the local hardware isn't quite beefy enough to run anything really useful yet. Maybe Apple will do something interesting in that space at WWDC.

Also not feasible. A network request to groq type machines will outperform your local hardware by such a huge amount that it wont make sense other than some very niche tasks

Except nobody but groq has such type of machines, and the economics of cloud AI is very hard to make it works in practice. Offloading the capital cost (which is the hardest kind of cost to swallow for a company) to customers is very compelling business-wise.
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