OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’ • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#251

Post by dartos » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #164

saurik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon (the retail business not AWS) does seem to have a pretty big moat. For starters they have delivery down. In major cities you can get stuff delivered in hours. That is crazy and hard to replicate. They have a huge inventory/marketplace. Basically any product is available. That is very difficult to replicate.

They have their own fleet of planes for shipping.

Amazon’s vertical integration is their mote.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#252

Post by terminalgravity » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

lupusreal wrote: post #224

sdesol wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It is widely understood that you really can't compete with "as good as". 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.

Im not sure a gas station analogy really works. I use a gas station out of convenience (i.e. its on my route) and will only go out of my way for a significant difference in price. This means i go to the same gas stations even when there are others that are “as good as” around just because it’s convenient for me. Similarly if i already setup an account with Amazon and currently use Amazon i won’t move to an “as good as” competitor just because its an inconvenience to setup a new account, add billing info, add my address, etc… for no real improvement.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#253

Post by dartos » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

cm2187 wrote: post #198

saurik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon as in AWS is possibly a better analogy. What AWS sells is mostly commodity. Their moat is the cost of integration. Once a company has developed all its system around AWS, they are locked in, just because of the integration cost of switching. OpenAI only sells a single component, so the lock in is weaker. But once you have a business a company depends on which has been tested and relies on OpenAI, I can see the…

Many cloud native companies have realized they his and are actually moving off of public clouds.

It’s slow and painful, but the expense is driving some customers away.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#254

Post by ben_w » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #236

ben_w wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That logic applies for AI-cynics rather than AI-doomers — the latter are metaphorically the equivalent of warning about CO2-induced warming causing loss of ice caps and consequent sea level rises and loss of tens of trillions of dollars of real estate as costal cities are destroyed… in 1896*, when it was already possible to predict, but we were a long way from both the danger and the zeitgeist to care. But only metap…

> But only metaphorically the equivalent, as the maximum downside is much worse than that. Maybe I'm a glass-half-full sort of guy, but everyone dying because we failed to reverse man-made climate change doesn't seem strictly better than everyone dying due to rogue AI

Given the assumption that climate change would kill literally everyone, I would agree.

But also: I think it extremely unlikely for climate change to do that, even if extreme enough to lead to socioeconomic collapse and a maximal nuclear war.

Also also, I think there are plenty of "not literally everyone" risks from AI that will prevent us from getting to the "really literally everyone" scenarios.

So I kinda agree with you anyway — the doomers thinking I'm unreasonably optimistic, e/acc types think I'm unreasonably pessimistic.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#255

Post by n_ary » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #21

This rings true to my ears: > There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly…

I believe that, their brand “ChatGPT” is the moat. Here in EU, every news media and random strangers on the streets who don’t understand anything beyond TikTok also knows that AI=ChatGPT. The term is so ubiquitous with AI that, I am willing to bet when someone tells someone else about AI, they tell ChatGPT and the new person will search and use ChatGPT without any knowledge of Claude/Gemini/LLama et. al. This is the same phenomenon as web search is now = Google, despite other prominent ones existing.

The competitions are mostly too narrow(programming/workflow/translation etc) and not interesting.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#256

Post by staticman2 » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

bravura wrote: post #35

People keep saying stuff like this, but I don't believe it: "There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble." AI progress is driven by strong valuable data. Detailed important conversation with a chatbot are much more valuable that quick search queries. As LLMs extend past web UIs, there is even more interaction data to capture and learn from. The company that capture…

Is conversation data really that valuable?

If I have the LLM translate a text from French to English... what is there to learn from that? Maybe the translation is great maybe it's awful, but there's no "correct" translation to evaluate the LLM against to improve it.

If I ask the chatbot for working code and it can't provide it, again, there's no "correct" code to train it against found in the conversation.

If I ask an LLM to interpret a bible passage, whether it does a good job or a terrible job there's no "correct" answer that the provider has to use as the gold standard, just the noise of people chatting with arbitrary answers.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#257

Post by n_ary » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:54 PM UTC

noch wrote: post #167

bruce511 wrote: post #136

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…

> There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Gruber writes: " My take on OpenAI is that both of the following are true: OpenAI currently offers, by far, the best product experience of any AI chatbot assistant. There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. " It's amusing to me that he seems to think that OpenAI (or xAI or DeepSeek or DeepMi…

> How much risk investors are willing to undertake for this prize is evident from their investments, after all, these investors all lived through prior business cycles and bubbles and have the institutional knowledge to know what they're getting into, financially.

There are not that many unicorns these days, so anyone missing out on last unicorn decades are now in immense FOMO and is willing to bet big. Besides, AGI is considered(own opinion) personal skynet(wet dream of all nations’ military) that will do your bidding. Hence everyone wants a piece of that Pie. Also when the bigCo(M$/Google/Meta) are willing to bet on it, makes the topic much more interesting and puts invisible seal of approval from technically savvy corps, as the previous scammy cryptocurrency gold rush was not participated by any bigCo(to best of my knowledge) but GenAI is full game with all.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#258

Post by htrp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #149

bruce511 wrote: post #136

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…

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…

>you had a website that was 100% technologically identical to Amazon, but you were willing to make slightly less money

You've basically described Temu

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#259

Post by htrp » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 1:58 PM UTC

netdevphoenix wrote: post #245

saurik wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Missing the point though. Amazon isn't Amazon because of its tech (speed, reliability, etc) doesn't matter as much as: inventory (tons of things you can only find there), delivery speed (you can reliably get 99% of the things in a week or less and some of the items get delivered in HOURS) and customer service (you are right by default, you will refunded and get free delivery if you encounter issues). That's the ultim…

> Temu has shown big strides but its ethical problems will prevent them from becoming a true threat.

Does the average Temu user care about the company's ethical problems? Does the average Amazon user?

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#260

Post by l33tman » Mon, Dec 30, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

shalmanese wrote: post #123

toddmorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

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…

They all work the same and each has its own pro's and con's for each model they launch. Even the API's are generic. It's a bit more difficult to lock in 3rd party partners using your API if your API literally is English. It's going to be a race to the bottom where the value in LLMs is the underlying value of the GPU-time they run on plus a few % upmark.