221–230 of 323 posts
This doesn't seem to say much to back its comparisons. Wouldn't spending a giant amount of money create some sort of moat?
From what I'm reading of the industry, no not really. The laughably huge investments seem to buy OpenAI approximately a 6 month head start over open source models, which is not much.
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> How much would you invest for a given probability that the company you invest in will be able to manufacture intelligence at scale in 10 years? What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify, and if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return.
> What's the expected return on investment for "intelligence"? This is extremely hard to quantify […] if you listen to the AI-doomer folks, potentially an extremely negative return. Indeed. And that asymmetry is what makes a market: people who can more accurately quantify the value or risk of stuff are the ones who win. If it were easy then we'd all invest in the nearest AI startup or short the entire market and 100x…
But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that.
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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…
> 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 It is widely understood that you really can't compete with "as good as". People won't leave Google, Facebook, etc. if you can only provide a service as good as, because the effort required to move would not be worth it. > if you show me a product th…
Sure you can, that's why there are hundreds if not thousands of brands of gas station. The companies you list are unusual exceptions, not the way things usually work.
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In the early days of Google, people believed there could be absolutely no moat in search because competition was just "one click away" and even Google believed this and deeply internalized this into their culture of technological dominance as the only path to survival. At the beginning of ride sharing, people believed there was absolutely no geographical moat and all riders were just one cheaper ride from switching s…
It is really unbelievable how much money companies will spend to avoid talking to and thoroughly understanding their users. OpenAI could probably learn a lot from interviewing 200 random people every 6 months and seeing what they use and why, but my guess is they would consider that frivolous.
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In the early days of Google, people believed there could be absolutely no moat in search because competition was just "one click away" and even Google believed this and deeply internalized this into their culture of technological dominance as the only path to survival. At the beginning of ride sharing, people believed there was absolutely no geographical moat and all riders were just one cheaper ride from switching s…
There's still one thing missing here: the browser. I do not agree with Gruber's analogy that the LLM is the browser. The interface to the LLM is the browser. We have seen some attempts at creating good browsers for LLM but we do not have NetScape, IE/Edge, Chrome, FF, Brave yet. Once we do, you would very easily be jumping between these models, and even letting the browser pick a model for you based on the type of qu…
That is one of the reason why ChatGpt has a desktop App, so that users can directly interact with it and give access to users files/Apps as well.
Frankly, OpenAI efforts seem quite funny for me personally as for most tasks I do Claude is far superior and yet OpenAI behaves as if they were the only game in town. The so-called open source models are getting better and better and even if OpenAI suddenly discovered some new tech that would allow for another breakthrough, it will be immediately picked up by others.
The data backs it up, Anthropic make most of their revenue from API while ChatGpt makes most of its revenue from the plus plan.
I once had a colleague that told me in order to make a small fortune, all you need to do is begin with a large fortune.
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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…
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…
Amazon has scale economics, branding power, and process power. It would take years to fully rebuild Amazon from scratch even given unlimited money. Right now, OpenAI's brand is actually probably its strongest "moat" and that is probably only there because Google fumbled Bard so badly.