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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#341
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but the API is so unbelievably cheap in comparison. I couldn't spend $20 if I tried using it constantly. My bill is a few bucks every month and you don't have to deal with "As a large language model…"

> and you don't have to deal with "As a large language model…" what do you mean? is the API uncensored?

I don't know if it's entirely uncensored but it doesn't have the moderation API in front of it or the other manual tweaks OpenAI added to ChatGPT so largely it will just do whatever you ask it to without paragraphs of disclaimers.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#342

The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature d…

Possibly unrealistic, but my fear is that they will end up like Netflix more than uber. Some will scream in horror but I wanted Netflix to be a monopoly. A single place and app and account with all the content I need. "competition" in streaming space has been nothing but disastrous for me as a consumer. It led to greedy heterogeneous islands of content, with proliferation of crappy apps and pointless restrictions and…

I think this will happen, will be as inconvenient as you envision, but I think it will be for the best.

We're not socially ready for one AI winner. The resulting giant would be too powerful and too influential.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#343

The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature d…

Greater uptake -> more data -> better AI

If anything is going to be based on how good the tech is, it's this.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#344
post #294
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was definitely a theory that made people burn tons of money on the past couple of years, but I don’t think it holds water. These models are getting obsolete so fast, and there’s so many open ones, I doubt any one’s privately trained model can stay relevant for long

The data is the moat. (If you can train your internally deployed LLM on data none of your competitors have, that's an advantage).

It's not anymore. If the model is publicly accessible, its skills can be distilled by performing some API calls and recording input-output pairs. This scheme works so well it has become the main mode to prepare data for small models. Model skills leak.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The winner is going to be the consumers of AI. It's a race to the bottom on pricing on the provider/infra side. It seems very unlikely that any single LLM provider will achieve a sustained and durable advantage enough to achieve large margins on their product. Consumers can swap between providers with relative ease, and there is very little stickiness to these LLM APIs, since the interfaces are general and operate on…

> The winner is going to be the consumers Cloud infra may be a comparable market, since computation is a big share of AI costs. Did consumers win big from competition between AWS, Azure, and GCP? Not sure. I see an uptick in write ups saying “We switched off cloud and reduced costs by 2/3rds.” Not a scientific sample but may leave the question open.

But you also have to account for the counterfactuals.

If the cloud had not existed, those that claim they saved money switching away from cloud might never have been in business in the first place.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#346
post #338

The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature d…

How would a potential competitor obtain an equivalent body of training data?

OpenAI has been the largest unintentional producer of LLM datasets. Everyone is leaching on GPT-4 even though the license says "no, no!".

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#347
post #134
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are only two services that are dirt cheap and way too reliable, useful.That's S3 and SQS. Rest can get very expensive very soon. You can build a lot of stuff on top of these two.

Even for S3 while the storage is dirt cheap they still have exorbitant bandwidth pricing.

Oh yes. You're right.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#348

The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature d…

Possibly unrealistic, but my fear is that they will end up like Netflix more than uber. Some will scream in horror but I wanted Netflix to be a monopoly. A single place and app and account with all the content I need. "competition" in streaming space has been nothing but disastrous for me as a consumer. It led to greedy heterogeneous islands of content, with proliferation of crappy apps and pointless restrictions and…

Just like the pirate Bay online cinema is better than every streaming service there could be pirate LLM that uses all the data, maybe it could be even trained by internet users sharing a bit of compute with some program?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#349

The premise of this is flawed. OpenAI is cheap because of has to be right now. They need to establish market dominance quickly, before competitors slide in. The winner of this horse race is not going to be the company with the best performing AI, it’s going to be the one who does the best job at creating an outstanding UX, ubiquitously presence, entrenching users, and building competitive moats that are not feature d…

One mayor difference between Uber and Open AI is that fundamentally openeyes technology will get cheaper for them to run, hardware wise and software wise. They just need to hold their position long enough for variants of Moores law to kick in.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely wrong, the best AI will win. There is insane demand for better models.

Depends how you define quality. This paper reflects my own experience https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08377 and shows how LLM technology has a lot more to offer than "ChatGPT". The real takeaway is that by training LLMs with real training data (even with a "less powerful" model) you can get an error rate more than 10x less than you get with the "zero shot" model of asking ChatGPT to answer a question for you the same way…

Yes! Prompts are super finicky.

You have to create a prompt/function that for a wide set of inputs, generates a token sequence that will perpetually expand in a manner that corresponds to an externally observed truth.

Way too often it feels like you have to shove a universal decoding sequence into a prompt.

“Talk your steps, list your clues, etc.”

Just trying to luck into a prompt that keeps decompressing the model/ generating the next token that ensures the next token is true.*

I recall there was a paper with a relevant title recently… https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

Basically - LLMs don’t reason , they regurgitate. If they have the right training data, and the right prompt, they can decompress the training data into something that can be validated as true

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* Also this has to be done in a limited context window, there is no long term memory, and there is no real underlying model of thought.

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