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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#201

Post by 2001zhaozhao »

nojs wrote: post #190

> There is no equivalent of the network effects seen at everything from Windows to Google Search to iOS to Instagram, where market share was self-reinforcing and no amount of money and effort was enough for someone else to to break in or catch up. What is the network effect of Google Search?

The main direct network effect is that Google uses heuristic data from users to improve their search rankings. (e.g. which links they click, whether someone returns quickly to Google after clicking on a link, etc)

Other factors that favor Google at scale:

- Sites often allow only the biggest search engine crawlers and block every other bot to prevent scraping. This has been going on for more than a decade and is especially true now with AI crawlers going around.

- Google search earns more per search than competitors due to their more mature ad network that they can hire lots of engineers to work on to improve ad revenues. They can also simply serve more relevant ads since their ad network is bigger.

- Google can simply share costs (e.g. index maintenance) among many more users.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#202

Post by bandrami »

mattnewton wrote: post #183
bandrami wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I asked mistral to list five mammals that don't have "e" in their name. Number three was "otter" and number five was "camel". phi4-mini-reasoning took the same prompt and bailed out because (at least according to its trace) it interpreted it as meaning "can't have a, e, i, o, or u in the name". Local is the only inference paradigm I'm interested in, but these things have a way to go.

Models will always struggle with this specific task without tool use, because of the way they tokenize things. I think a bit of prompt engineering, asking it to spell out each work or giving it the ability to run a “contains e” python function on a lot of animal names it generates or searches for solves this. Lots of local ai use cases I think are solvable similarly once local models get good at tool use and have the…

The problem with tool use is that I usually find I only need it for one component of a pipeline. So in this case mentally I would be tooling it as

cat /usr/share/dict/words | print_if_mammal | grep -v 'e'

but I don't know of a good way to incorporate an LLM into a pipeline like that (I know there's a Python API). What I'm actually interested in is "is this the name of a mammal?" but I don't know of the equivalent of a quiet "batch mode" at least for ollama (and of course performance).

I guess ultimately I would want to say "write a shell utility that accepts a line from standard input and prints it to standard output if that is the name of a mammal", and then use that utility in that pipeline. Or really to have an llmfilter utility that lets you do something like

cat /usr/share/dict/words | llmfilter "is this a mammal?" | grep -v "e"

and now that I've said that I think I'll try to make one.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#203

Post by srivmo »

ryanlitalien wrote: post #45

I speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.

Google Translate has been doing this forever and people in countries like Turkiye have been using it for a while. The usecase you're talking about is not exactly an LLM use case tbh.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#204

Post by gmac »

onion2k wrote: post #161
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right about stickyness up to a point. Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé. OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish. Not owning their own infra…

Pick a lane or perish. Literally every industry has examples of businesses that don't excel at anything and still do well enough to carry on. In fact, in most industries, it's actually hard to see any business that's clearly leading on any specific front because as soon as it becomes an obvious factor in gaining market share the competing businesses focus on that area as well.

Yeah. Vauxhall/Opel has always been my go-to example here. Their cars excel at nothing. They’re not especially stylish. Not the fastest or nicest to drive. Not unusually efficient. Not particularly reliable or guaranteed for a long period. By no means the cheapest. They don’t even achieve a sweet spot of averageness across all these things. Yet people have somehow carried on buying them over decades.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#205

Post by ahtihn »

neya wrote: post #73
shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that…

> They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.

Wasn't there already a ruling that LLM output is not protected by copyright?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#206

Post by shinycode »

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

I don’t know how much of an anecdote it is, but all the non-tech people with whom I talk about IA only know chatGPT. Competition is either non existent or the same thing. Among those, no one wants to pay the service, they just stop using it when limits are reached. I can’t say which users can turn the market around but chatGPT is indeed burned in the mind of many and because they don’t care about tech and are not interested in tech they won’t search for any other service it seems. Even after many discussions they don’t remember the names of other IA I told them

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#207

Post by deanc »

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

Exactly. ChatGPT is ubiquitous for the new generation of AI (LLMs) for everyone outside our of bubble. I've spoken to dozens of friends and non-techncial folks about this topic over the last year and not a single one has ever said they use Gemini, Grok or Claude.

OpenAI has by far the strongest brand and user base. It's not even close.

And, when it comes to the product they've been locked in the last few months it seems. The coding models are no longer behind Anthropic's and their general-use chat offering has always been up there at the top.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#208

Post by bandrami »

soleveloper wrote: post #200
bandrami wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I asked mistral to list five mammals that don't have "e" in their name. Number three was "otter" and number five was "camel". phi4-mini-reasoning took the same prompt and bailed out because (at least according to its trace) it interpreted it as meaning "can't have a, e, i, o, or u in the name". Local is the only inference paradigm I'm interested in, but these things have a way to go.

Treat LLMs as dyslexic when it comes to spelling. Assess their strengths and weaknesses accordingly.

They're literally text generators so that's... troubling

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#209

Post by gonzo41 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #29

Everyone is actually underestimating stickiness. The near billion users OpenAI has is actually a real moat and might translate into decent chunk of revenue. My wife, for example, uses ChatGPT on a daily basis, but has found no reason to try anything else. There are no network effects for sure, but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Understandable tha…

nah, open ai doesn't have a moat it has a brief window to get a lot cheaper to run or it's going to go pop when someone figure out how to do inference a lot cheaper.
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