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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#221

Post by foo42 »

daxfohl wrote: post #130

I just wonder how long it'll take local models to be good enough for 99% of use cases. It seems like it has to happen sooner or later. My hunch is that in five years we'll look back and see current OpenAI as something like a 1970's VAX system. Once PCs could do most of what they could, nobody wanted a VAX anymore. I have a hard time imagining that all the big players today will survive that shift. (And if that partic…

I hope you're right, but is there any guarantee that there will continue to be institutions willing to spend the money to produce open models?

I almost wonder if we need some sort of co-op for training and another for hosted inference

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#222

Post by nextlevelwizard »

bandrami wrote: post #178
daxfohl wrote: post #130

I just wonder how long it'll take local models to be good enough for 99% of use cases. It seems like it has to happen sooner or later. My hunch is that in five years we'll look back and see current OpenAI as something like a 1970's VAX system. Once PCs could do most of what they could, nobody wanted a VAX anymore. I have a hard time imagining that all the big players today will survive that shift. (And if that partic…

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.

I don't really see the problem here. Yeah, we know that these models are not good for actual logic. These models are lossy data compression and most-likely-responses-from-internet-forums-and-articles machines.

This kind of parlor tricks are not interesting and just because a model can list animals with or without some letters in their names doesn't mean anything especially since it isn't like the model "thinks" in English it just gives you the answer after translating it to English.

These are funny, like how you can do weird stuff with JavaScript language by combining special characters, but that doesn't really mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Like JavaScript these models despite their specific flaws still continue to deliver value to people using them.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#223

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

fhd2 wrote: post #187
tikotus wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion. So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussio…

In my experience non-technical folks quite dig the memory feature. For me that's kinda context poisoning as a service, but I know people that get value out of it (or at least strongly feel they do). Not sure how one would migrate that.

> Not sure how one would migrate that.

Ctrl-C Ctrl-V?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#224

Post by dahcryn »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218
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…

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

not necessarily, if openai managed to monetize free users. Could be through advertising, or integrations with marketplaces on commission (e.g. order your next Hello Fresh through ChatGPT? Get recommended a hotel?)

They could succeed where Alexa failed. A free user can even bring in more than a paid user if you look at some platforms like spotify, where apparently there is a large chunk of free users generating more income through ads than if they would pay

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#225

Post by foo42 »

shinycode wrote: post #206
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 int…

The only two models I ever hear non technical people mention are ChatGPT and occasionally Gemini

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#226

Post by basch »

candu wrote: post #213
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…

> but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Except these aren't conversations in the traditional sense. Yes, there's the history of prompts and responses exchanged. But the threads don't build on each other - there's no cross-conversational memory, such as you'd have in a human relationship. Even within a conversation it's mostly stateless, sending the…

ChatGPT and Gemini has cross conversation personalization. I believe the former is off by default and the latter is on.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#227

Post by nextlevelwizard »

PunchTornado wrote: post #173
sinenomine wrote: post #13

People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.

Funny. What lead? Gemini and Claude are much better.

Yeah. I also do not see the lead. Claude Opus writes better code and for conversation all models even Le Chat is just better than ChatGPT currently.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#228

Post by nextlevelwizard »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #219
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

>Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. Don't underestimate advertising. Noone pays for Facebook or Google search. Yet the ad business with a couple billion users seems profitable enough to fund frontier LLM research and inference infrastructure as a side-gig in these companies. Google only rushed out AI overview because they saw ChatGPT eating their market share in information retri…

Maybe I am underestimating how suggestible average people are as someone who has never in their lives clicked on an ad I just can't see ads being anything but a deterrent for using the service

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#229

Post by nextlevelwizard »

dahcryn wrote: post #224
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is she paying for it? That is the only question that matters in the end. For myself, I use LLMs daily and I would even say a lot on some days and I _did_ pay the 20€/mo subscription for ChatGPT, but with the latest model I cannot justify that anymore. 4o was amazingly good even if it had some parasocial issues with some people, it actually did what I expect an LLM to do. Now the quality of the 5.whatever has gone dra…

not necessarily, if openai managed to monetize free users. Could be through advertising, or integrations with marketplaces on commission (e.g. order your next Hello Fresh through ChatGPT? Get recommended a hotel?) They could succeed where Alexa failed. A free user can even bring in more than a paid user if you look at some platforms like spotify, where apparently there is a large chunk of free users generating more i…

We are so far away from ordering stuff from LLM

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#230

Post by eigenspace »

bandrami wrote: post #208
soleveloper wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

They're text generators, but you can think of them as basically operating with a different alphabet than us. When they are given text input, it's not in our alphabet, and when they produce text output it's also not in our alphabet. So when you ask them what letters are in a given word, they're literally just guessing when they respond.

Rather, they use tokens that are usually combinations of 2-8 characters. You can play around with how text gets tokenized here: https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer

_____

For example, the above text I wrote has 504 characters, but 103 tokens.

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