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

semianalysis.com

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

#231

Post by dtech »

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…

OSM is quite popular through commercial providers, mainly Mapbox. Why you're not using it daily is because there's no concentrated effort to make a consumer-friendly product from it, like Wikipedia mostly is for Encyclopedia. Too early to tell what will be the case for LLM.

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

#232

Post by Closi »

mirekrusin wrote: post #142
tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

If you think you can use GPT-4 then you don't know what you're talking about. API access is on waitlist. UI has limit of 25 messages in 3 hours. If you think big, known companies can get ahead of the waitlist and use it - short answer is no, they can't because of their IP. Nobody is going to sign off leaking out all internal knowledge to play with something. ClosedAI seems to have big problem with capacity. Those poe…

Pretty easy to get API access, I got it within a few days. Aware this is a sample of one, but also can’t believe they fast tracked me.

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

#233

Post by btilly »

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.

My experience is the opposite.

People in the real world care about things like hours of operation. Google makes it really easy for businesses to keep them up to date on things like holiday closures. OSM makes it a nightmare.

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

#234

Post by aabajian »

I don't know if I agree with the article. I recall when Google IPO'ed, nobody outside of Google really knew how much traffic they had and how much money they were making. Microsoft was caught off-guard. Compare this to ChatGPT: My friends, parents, grandparents, and coworkers (in the hospital) use ChatGPT. None of these people know how to adapt an open source model to their own use. I bet ChatGPT is vastly ahead in terms of capturing the market, and just hasn't told anyone just how far. Note that they have grown faster in traffic than Instagram and TikTok, and they are used across the demographics spectrum. They released something to the world that astounded the average joe, and that is the train that people will ride.

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

#235

Post by hatsix »

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

The author's timeline makes it clear that they feel it was a catalyst. They're separating out "Stable Diffusion" the software from the "Stable Diffusion" moment.

The community has created their own replacement for LLaMA (Cerebras) with none of the encumberance. Even if LLaMA is deleted tomorrow, the LLaMA Leak will still be a moment when the direction dramatically shifted.

The "people" are not talking about the future of where this software is going. They're talking about a historical event, though it was recent enough that I remember what I ate for lunch that day.

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

#237

Post by IIAOPSW »

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…

I've been using osm more and more recently. Google just makes a bunch of frustrating decisions that really pushed me to look elsewhere. Especially in the public transport layer, but more generally in being really bad at deciding when to hide details with no way to override it and say "TELL ME THE NAME OF THIS CROSS STREET DAMNIT THATS THE ONLY REASON I KEEP ZOOMING IN HERE!!!".

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

#238

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

tikkun wrote: post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

> Linux won in servers and supercomputing, but not in end user computing.

Pardon the side discussion, but I think this is because of a few things.

1. OS-exclusive "killer apps" (Office, anything that integrates with an iPhone)

2. Games

The killer apps have better alternatives now, and games are starting to work better on Linux. Microsoft's business model no longer requires everyone to use Windows. (Mac is another story.) So I think that, at least for non-Macolytes, Linux end user dominance is certainly on the horizon.

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

#239

Post by qwertox »

passwordoops wrote: post #205

Cynical rant begin I'm sorry but I think this has more to do with looming anti trust legislation and the threat of being broken up than a sincere analysis of moats. Especially with the FTC's announcement on Meta yesterday, I'm seeing lots of folks say we need to come down hard on AI too. This letter's timing is a bit too convenient. Cynical rant over

"Just so you know, we won't be the ones to blame for all the bad which is about to come"

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

#240

Post by sounds »

photochemsyn wrote: post #93
sounds wrote: post #20

Repeating myself from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35164971 : > OpenAI can't build a moat because OpenAI isn't a new vertical, or even a complete product. > Right now the magical demo is being paraded around, exploiting the same "worse is better" that toppled previous ivory towers of computing. It's helpful while the real product development happens elsewhere, since it keeps investors hyped about something. >…

ML dominating education seems pretty realistic to me. E.g. this series of prompts for example: > "Please design a syllabus for a course in Computer Architecture and Assembly language, to be taught at the undergraduate level, over a period of six weeks, from the perspective of an professor teaching the material to beginning students." > "Please redesign the course as an advanced undergraduate six-month Computer Archit…

Fortunately, what I said was that a single company becomes the sole source for the ML in education; not the same thing and thus I have no conflict with your statement.
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