261–270 of 323 posts
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Every time a new model comes out I ask it to locate El Dorado or Shangri-La for me. That’s my criteria for AGI/ASI. Alas I am still without my mythical city of gold.
Somebody is going to write Wizard of Oz for all this and I’m for it.
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Dropbox and Slack are examples of another possible outcome: capture the early adopters and stay a player in the space, but still have your lunch eaten by big tech suites that ship similar products.
this is probably how OpenAI is going to end up with. there is no clear tech barrier that can't be crossed by competitors. openai came up with all sorts of cool stuff, but almost all of them have seen a peer competitor in just months. the recent release of deepseek v3 is a good example, o1 level model trained under 6 million USD, it pretty much beat openai by a large margin.
Why Meta decided to open source their Llama architecture and complete models? From a strategic business perspective, I'm trying to puzzle why they would give that up, a competitive advantage (even though it might not be as good as OpenAI product), rather than directly competing with OpenAI. What's the reasoning behind this decision?
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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…
I feel like you (and others) are saying what I'm saying. I said; >> There is no technical moat, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moat. Meaning that just because the moat is not technical doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Clearly Amazon, Google, Facebook etc have moats, but they are not "better software". They found other things to act as the moat (distribution, branding, network effects). OpenAI will need to find a d…
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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…
The problem with ChartGPT is that that dont own any platform. Which means out of the 3 Billion Android + Chrome OS User, and ~1.5B iOS + Mac. They have zero. There only partner is Microsoft with 1.5B Window PC. Considering a lot of people only do work on Windows PC I would argue that personalisation comes from Smartphone more so than PC. Which means Apple and Google holds the key.
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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…
(Sure you might say I'll subscribe to both, $20, $40, it's no big deal - but the masses won't, people already agonise over and share (I do too!) video streaming services which are typically cheaper.)
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> Their "moat" is in public minds here. Same for OpenAI. Anytime I talk to young people who are not programmers, they know about ChatGPT and not much else. Never heard of Llama nor what an LLM is.
You could have said the same about Netscape in 1997. Noone knew what IE was (and if they did, thought it was inferior) and no one certainly knew what Chrome was (didn't exist). Yet, the browser market eventually didn't matter, got commoditized and what mattered were the applications built on top of it.
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…
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…
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Walmart and Target can get truckloads of items to a relatively few stores. Amazon can get items to people’s houses
Right, which Amazon originally accomplished with huge assistance from expensive contracts with UPS, but they used software (and new hardware) and mobile internet technology to figure out how to reduce their delivery costs by being able to figure out how to incentivize cheaper independent contractors to deliver their packages, rather than expensive UPS union employees.
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Google didn't have ads until 2000. They strongly resisted banner ads (which were the only format at the time) until they invented contextual text ads.
So, it took Google a whole year to display ads. That's really not the description of a company that is " without a clear path to profitability".
I have friends who interviewed in 1999, and all of them came away with the same view - they did not know how the company would make money. They all poked at this topic, and the founders were explicit they really did not want to sell ads. Two of them refused to join because they thought it would fail as a result[1]. So while they did end up doing that, it seems very clear they did not want to go that path if they could avoid it.
If you have actual evidence that suggests this is not the case, rather than the random unsupported conjecture that it was "always their goal", i'd love to hear it!
I've not met a single person who says anything but what i just said - it was not always their goal, they had no desire to do it.
[1] Amusingly both ended up founding and selling companies for over 100m, so they did okay in the end despite theoretically missing a huge opportunity ;)