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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#281
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and inst…

Claude may seem incongruous compared to the others, however it's the only human sounding name, compared to the robotic "chatgpt" or others that sound generic or bland company names (Gemini, perplexity). They intentionally chose a more bland sounding name, as, I assume, they wanted to emphasise the "safe" nature compared to their competitors. As more information comes out about openai, people may choose to move to for…

> They intentionally chose a more bland sounding name, as, I assume, they wanted to emphasise the "safe" nature compared to their competitors.

A lack of creativity seems more likely to me. It’s a GPT in a chat window.

> Openai getting closer to the US military whilst anthropic standing their ground and rejecting them.

Except they didn’t. They folded faster than a house of cards during an earthquake. It boggles the mind anyone thought they wouldn’t. Ultimately they only care about money and winning.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#282
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is always about performance plateau. If LLM performance plateaus, then OSS models will catch up. If there isn’t a plateau, then I can simply ask the super intelligent AI to distill itself, or tell me how to build a clone. It’s ironic, if the promise of AGI were realized, all knowledge companies, including AI companies, become worthless

LLM performance has already plateaued. I don't know, nor care what benchmarks are saying, because they not once translated to the real world for me. The only thing that has seen massive boost are harnesses around AI. And AI companies are behind here compared to OSS.

> And AI companies are behind here compared to OSS.

How so?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

>Maybe I am underestimating

You sure are. And it sounds like you are also underestimating the effect yourself as well. In fact this perception is so common that there is even a name for it in psychology: Third-person effect. Many people believe that advertising does not affect them. But ironically, the more you believe so, the more likely you are to fall victim to particular types of advertising. And in general your response to ads will be very similar to everyone else's. These "annoying" ads that you "would never click on" are just badly personalized or badly placed ads. That's the only type that gets stuck in your mind when you think of ads, based on your personal biases. But the major tech companies have spent the last one-and-a-half decades on perfecting the psychology of advertising. You might think you are immune, but you are certainly not. Every buying decision you have made in the last 10 years was almost certainly influenced to some degree. Just not always consciously. And I'm willing to bet that a lot of buying decisions were already heavily influenced by ChatGPT, even before their shopping feature. OpenAI just didn't profit on them as much as they could.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#284
post #179

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…

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and inst…

I have heard "cloud code" many times from colleagues who do not really know what either cloud OR Claude Code is more than "stuff we should use".

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#285

I have only dabbled with Claude and other AI tools, but from what I can tell, only ChatGPT has folders and a robust organization system. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong here.) This matters a lot to me, as I use AI as something of an ongoing project organizer, and not purely for specific prompts. So at least for me, it would be a huge hassle to move to another platform, on par with moving from one note-taking softwar…

Check Claude Projects.

Also Claude Code.

Both have "folders".

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#286

Well there's the whole race to ASI thing. Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs. The thing will learn how learn, an intelligence feedback loop, make its own apps, find more efficient algorithms, deploy itself to more locations, bankrupt all competitors, embed itself in everyone's lives, and create a complete monopoly for the parent company that can never be touched. Until it goes rogue anyway. (Aside, it's in…

Why will it do all these things? Many people say we’re at AGI already and I’m wondering why everyone hasn’t died yet.

> Many people say we’re at AGI already and I’m wondering why everyone hasn’t died yet.

That’s like saying “many people say the Earth is flat and I’m wondering why anyone hasn’t fallen off the edge yet”.

“Many people say” doesn’t translate to reality. Maybe AGI will kill us all, maybe it won’t (I think we’re doing a fine job of that ourselves, no need for a machine’s help), but we’re definitely not at AGI, except in the minds of a few deluded people (or scammers).

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#287

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 just wonder how long it'll take local models to be good enough for 99% of use cases.

Qwen 2.5 was already there. "99% of use cases" isn't a very high bar right now.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#288
post #73

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…

OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that…

> Advertising requires good user models to work…

…and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#289
post #249

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…

Taking the opposite side of that bet, here is why: * even if an openweight model appears on huggingface today, exceeding SOTA, given my extensive experience with a wide variety of model sizes, I would find it highly surprising the "99% of use cases" could be expressed in * Meanwhile: I pulled claude to look into consumer GPU VRAM growth rates, median consumer VRAM went 1-2GB @ 2015 to ~8GB @ 2026, rougly doubles ever…

Increasing model size doesn't make your model smarter, it just makes it know more facts.

There's easier ways to do that.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#290

Well there's the whole race to ASI thing. Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs. The thing will learn how learn, an intelligence feedback loop, make its own apps, find more efficient algorithms, deploy itself to more locations, bankrupt all competitors, embed itself in everyone's lives, and create a complete monopoly for the parent company that can never be touched. Until it goes rogue anyway. (Aside, it's in…

> Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs.

Yes, just like the first person who will invent perpetual motion. /s

PS: to be clear, I'm not saying it's impossible but so far, just like perpetual motion or the Fountain of Youth it's an exciting idea anybody can easily understand yet nobody solved since it's been phrased out. It's not a solved problem and assuming it suddenly is is simply a (marketing) lie.

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