Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by BiteCode_dev » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

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…

Agreed, even the best open source projects, like Linux or Firefox, in their wonderful success, didn't render proprietary competition unable to have there piece of the market share.

And even in markets with very dominant free offers like video consumption, programming languages or VCS, you can still make tons of money by providing a service around it. E.G: github, netflix, etc.

OpenAI has a good product, a good team, a good brand and a good moving speed.

Selling them short is a bit premature.

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

#222

Post by crazyedgar » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

Are you sure? I have yet to see any evidence that anyone at all (including Google) has built a model (or a "platform" as you prefer to refer to them) that can follow instructions as well as 50% of ChatGPT, let alone GPT-4. I don't think any amount of work in LangChain and vector databases is enough to fix this: you really need a strong base model that is trained to align with human intentions well. Of course if you just want a bot that can answer free-form simple questions, then maybe people can't tell the difference. Just give them some real work to do and it becomes glaringly obvious.

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

#223

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

bilbo0s wrote: post #206

seydor wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what a lot of people think until they run Vicuna 13B or equivalent. We're just 5 months in this, there will be many leaps.

Yes there will, that's the problem HN User Minimaxir is talking about. It will only get less and less expensive for Microsoft in terms of cost. And more and more effective for Microsoft in terms of results delivered. How do you compete with free? That's the question. The previous internet experience has already shown us that "also be free" is not really a sustainable or even effective answer. You have to be better in…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by dpflan » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

summerlight wrote: post #18

This looks like a personal manifesto from an engineer who doesn't even attempt to write it on behalf of Google? The title is significantly misleading.

Completely agree. It is interesting, but the gravitas of it seems lower than of course if an executive said this and corroborated it. I do feel that opensource for AI is going to be really interesting and shake things up.

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

#225

Post by politician » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #178

The question I'd love to be able to ask the author is how, in fact, this is different from search. Google successfully built a moat around that, but one can argue, too, that it should not have been long-lived. True, there was the secrete page-rank sauce, but sooner or later everyone had that. Other corporations could crawl anything and index whatever at any cost (i.e. Bing), yet search, which is in some sense also a…

If the moat is simply brand name recognition, then the market leader is OpenAI. That's an existential problem for Google and explains the author's perspective.

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

#226

Post by Krasnol » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

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…

> 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.

The sheer size of the OSM project is staggering. Putting it next to Wikipedia, where missing content at some point wouldn't cause much fuss, makes it a bad example.

Besides that, your limited knowledge of the popularity of OSM gives you a wrong picture. OSM is already the base for popular businesses. Like Strava for example. TomTom is on board with it. Meta for longer with their AI tool, same as Microsoft. In some regions of the world where the community is very active, it IS better than Google Maps. Germany for example where I live. In many regions of the world, it is the superior map model for cycling or nature activities in general. Sometimes less civilised areas of the world have better coverage too because Google doesn't care about those regions. See parts of Africa or weird countries like North Korea.

One should also not forget the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team which provides humanitarian mapping in areas Google didn't care. You can help out too. It's quite easy: https://www.hotosm.org/

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

Many others have switched away after google lifted their prices. They'll lose the race here too. A simple donation of up-to-date world satellite imaginary would already be enough for an even faster grow.

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

#227

Post by adroitboss » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

lysecret wrote: post #144

Fantastic article if you are quick to just go to the comments like I usually do, don't. Read it. One of my favorites: LoRA works by representing model updates as low-rank factorizations, which reduces the size of the update matrices by a factor of up to several thousand. This allows model fine-tuning at a fraction of the cost and time. Being able to personalize a language model in a few hours on consumer hardware is…

You can find the guy who created it on reddit u/edwardjhu. I remember because he showed up in the Stable Diffusion Subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1223y27/im...

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

#228

Post by rretet5555 » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

hgomersall wrote: post #218

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

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…

In terms of data, OSM is so far ahead of Google maps in my experience. The rendering is much better too. What's not there is obvious and easy to use tooling that anyone can interact with. I mean, there might be, but I don't know about it.

The completeness and quality of OSM depends on the local community, and it varies greatly depending on where you live and use it.

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

#229

Post by hospitalJail » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

cldellow wrote: post #199

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 curren…

I dont know why you are downvoted. This is mostly correct.

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

#230

Post by moffkalast » Thu, May 04, 2023, 6:30 PM UTC

LanternLight83 wrote: post #212

CSMastermind wrote: post #192

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…

Just anacdotally, I see OSM mentioned a lot, guides for contributing, use in HomeLab and Raspberry Pi articles-- haven't check it out myself in a long time, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's continued growth really is inevitable, or even has a cumulative snowball-ball component

OSM's main problem is that it has no open sourced satelite imagery dataset to display, they're only using borrowed data to build its vector maps on. It just doesn't exist. Until that becomes a thing it'll stay a second rate map app for the average person, unfortunately.

It's the only map anyone can actually integrate into anything without an api key and a wallet with a wad of greens in it, so that keeps it relevant for now. Maybe if/when Starship lowers cost to orbit, then we'll see non-profit funded satellites that can source that dataset and keep it up to date.