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

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

#291

Post by seanmcdirmid »

chii wrote: post #185
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes that only the US is interested in using LLMs commercially, which isn't really true. Even if you can get America to sanction Chinese LLM use, you aren't even going to American allies to go along with that, let alone everyone else. China's biggest challenge ATM is that they do not yet economically produce the GPUs and RAM needed to train and use big models. They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10…

> They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10 or 20 years i dont believe they're as behind as many analysis deems. In fact, making it illegal to export western chips to china only serves to cause the mother of all inventions, necessity, to pressure harder and make it work.

They will definitely throw more resources at it, but without even older equipment from the west, they have a bigger hill to climb as well. There are lots of material engineering secrets that they have to uncover before they get there, so that’s just my estimate of what they need to do it. I definitely could be wrong though, we’ll see.

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

#292

Post by seanmcdirmid »

tw1984 wrote: post #188
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes that only the US is interested in using LLMs commercially, which isn't really true. Even if you can get America to sanction Chinese LLM use, you aren't even going to American allies to go along with that, let alone everyone else. China's biggest challenge ATM is that they do not yet economically produce the GPUs and RAM needed to train and use big models. They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10…

> China's biggest challenge ATM is that they do not yet economically produce the GPUs and RAM needed to train and use big models. They are still behind in semiconductors, maybe 10 or 20 years (they can make fast chips, they can make cheap chips, they can't yet make fast cheap chips). You don't need the most efficient chips to train LLMs. those much slower chips (e.g. those made by Huawei) will probably take longer fo…

Economy isn’t efficiency, China has a yield problem on the chips they need, and that reduces their progress.

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

#293

Post by [deleted] »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #174
lesuorac wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

It’s fascinating to think about how long it took Google to fully embrace advertising. I completely agree with the previous posters point—Google strongly resisted ads, which were everywhere back then. Then they went full corporate and their real turning point, came in 2007 with their acquisition of DoubleClick, about 12 years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin famously claimed that advertising and search engines don’t m…

[deleted]

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

#294

Post by ptx »

MndlshnDscpl wrote: post #24
asadotzler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, they started from scratch, they didn't take NCSA's Mosaic public, they left the university, brought in some established players, created a new company, and re-wrote the entire browser from scratch. SamA wants to take everything the non-profit created and just make it for profit. If he want's to do that he can create a new company, lure away the talent, start from scratch, and run from there. This "it's just lik…

Agreed. I think originally, it would have been more accurate to say IE was based on Mosaic. If I recall correctly, I think Microsoft bought out Spyglass Mosaic to base IE on, and that browser had been licensed from the NCSA. Netscape on the other hand had originally been Mosaic Communications(anyone remember home.mcom.com?) and changed the name when they did the clean rewrite. I think the name Mozilla came about beca…

Microsoft didn't buy it from Spyglass, they licensed it and agreed to pay royalties per copy. Then they gave it away for free to avoid paying royalties [0] while illegally sabotaging Netscape's business at the same time.

[0] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19970102/2516784/sp...

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

#295

Post by robertlagrant »

csomar wrote: post #196
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. The moat is actually huge (billions of $$). What is happening is that there are people/corps/governments that are willing to burn this kind of money on compute and then give you the open weight model free of charge (or maybe with very permissive and lax licensing terms). If it wasn't for that, there will be roughly three players in the market (An…

Yeah, that's my thought as well.

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

#296

Post by robertlagrant »

asadotzler wrote: post #94
mrbungie wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data is becoming a commodity in this regard. That can't be really their moat when Google, Anthropic, etc are publishing similar products.

Well, once the powerful steal it all, of course it becomes commoditization. Had they been required to abide by the law, something that few Silicon Valley VC-backed companies really worry about, this kind of "information" would not be a commodity, it'd be a lucrative property. But, Silicon Valley doesn't give a fuck about anyone so they just stole it all and now it's basically worthless as a result.

> something that few Silicon Valley VC-backed companies really worry about

Is that actually true?

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

#297

Post by otterley »

n_ary wrote: post #255
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…

A brand isn't much of a moat: MySpace's brand was a moat for a few years. Then Facebook came and ate their lunch.

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

#298

Post by otterley »

neals wrote: post #34
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 get the moat idea. But are there really any moats? What's a good moat these days anyway? Isn't being first and "really good" fine as well?

Copyright is an outstanding moat. Think Disney.

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

#299

Post by otterley »

scarmig wrote: post #82
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #62

> There is no technical moat in this field This is getting so repetitive now that it is stated as a truism. Isn't it the same bet yahoo was betting on in 2000 that it would win because their product branding is better? And now, Yahoo's and Microsoft's search engine is worse than Google from 2 decades ago.

Google's search engine is worse than Google from 2 decades ago.

Is it Google's search engine, or is it that there was less pollution on the Internet two decades ago?

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

#300

Post by tomjuggler »

stavros wrote: post #287
esafak wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even v3? edit: Fair enough. I'm fishing for opinions too.

My testing has been very limited, so I don't want to opine too much. If anyone has a differing opinion based on more testing, please share, I'm interested!

So I've been using Deepseek for 3 months with Aider coding assistant. Look up the "Aider LLM leaderboard" for proper test results if you like, in my experience the Deepseek V3 is just as good as Claude at less than 1/10th the price. I can't speak about o1 it is just too expensive to be worth it

OpenAI is going to be beaten on price, wait and see.

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