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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

341–350 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion. So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussio…

I'm curious from the other direction, what are the conversations like if you feel they are easy to move? Do you have the memory feature disabled? I have the feeling this in particular is doing absolutely loads behind the scene, e.g summarising all conversations and adding additional hidden context to every request. I can start a new chat in the UI right now, ask it what my job is, what my current project is, how many…

I ask for code snippets, occasional recipes, translations... I don't have memory enabled. I start a new chat for each question. At times I ask things in different languages, if the question is tied to culture or location. If I notice I asked the wrong question, I start a new session instead of continuing the old one, so it doesn't try to merge the questions somehow.

I don't see any benefit in it knowing anything about me. Instead I'm usually quite vague to avoid biased answers.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#342
post #331

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…

The trend with email, websites and so on has been to use some large cloud service rather than self host as it's easier. My bet is AI will be similar.

But AI is not about connectivity. Local models are just about as useful without an internet connection. Also, the hardware can fit in a small enclosure.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#343

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…

5 years is a bit optimistic. I have no desire to use anything dumber than Claude - but I doubt I'll need something much smarter either - or with so much niche knowledge baked in. The harness will take care of much. Faster would be nicer though.

That still requires a pretty large chip, and those will be selling at an insane premium for at least a few more years before a real consumer product can try their hand at it.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Influenced to some degree sure, weather influences me to some degree, but I truly feel like ads aren't affective on me. Unless we broaden definition of ads to something like sponsored content. I have bought some TTRPG rules sets after I have seen them being played in a sponsored video, but I still have never clicked an ad on a page and bought something.

And I actually have tried to use ChatGPT to buy something. I have asked it to search for specific items from EU stores so I wouldn't need to pay import taxes, but usually it fails. It either suggests Global stores which ship from US or China or it suggests different products than what I asked for.

If ChatGPT or whatever LLM I was using could actually link me the products I wanted without me searching for them they should get a commission for sure, but we sure aren't there yet.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#345
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would literally take you 5 mins to set up your wife with a competing client for her needs. Sure it's 'sticky' at least a little, but it's not a moat. A moat is a show stopper like they own you.

Just like it would take 10 seconds to buy her a Pepsi instead of her preferred Coke. Would you?

If it taste as good and is cheaper, sure.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imagine subliminal messages being sent in the llm responses carefully created for max impact on you. I’m sure many companies will pay to recommend their product on ChatGPT.

Okay, but if we are going scifi why not just beam ads in to dreams like in Futurama?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#347
post #295
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even with inflated RAM prices, you can buy a Strix Halo Mini PC with 128GB unified memory right now for less than 2k. It will run gpt-oss-120b (59 GB) at an acceptable 45+ tokens per second: https://github.com/lhl/strix-halo-testing?tab=readme-ov-file... I also believe that it should eventually be possible to train a model with somewhat persistent mixture of experts, so you only have to load different experts every f…

I agree the parent is a bit too pessimistic, especially because we care about logical skills and context size more than remembering random factoids.

But on a tangent, why do you believe in mixture of experts?

Every thing I know about them makes me believe they're a dead-end architecturally.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#348

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

Advertising is one of the biggest markets on the planet. Meta is nearly a $2T company and is making record profits.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#349

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…

In my experience with Gemini, most of its capabilities stem from web searching instead of something it has already "learned." Even if you could obtain the model weights and run them locally, the quality of the output would likely drop significantly without that live data.

To really have local LLMs become "good enough for 99% of use cases," we are essentially dependent on Google's blessing to provide APIs for our local models. I don't think they have any interest in doing so.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#350

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…

At the conversation backlogs worth anything? To me they seem as valuable as Google search history. After maybe 3 days they are worthless.
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