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Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

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371–380 of 1001 posts

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#371

This is easily among the rare highest quality articles/comments I've read in the past weeks, perhaps months (on LLMs/AI since that's what I am particularly interested in). And this was for internal consumption before it was made public. Reinforces my recent impression that so much that's being made for public consumption now is shallow and it is hard to find the good stuff. And sadly, increasing so even on HN. As I w…

There is some really high quality internal discussions at tech companies, unfortunately they are suffering from leaks due to their size and media have realized it’s really easy to just take their internal content and publish it. It really sucks because there’s definitely a chilling effect knowing any personal opinion expressed in text at a big tech company could end up in a headline like “GOOGLE SAYS ” because of a l…

This is exactly that. This doc is apparently a leaked internal doc.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#372
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what a lot of people think until they run Vicuna 13B or equivalent. We're just 5 months in this, there will be many leaps.

What makes you think open ai won't look at the FOSS improvements, include them in their tech, and make their GPU farm way cheaper, rendering their service even more competitive? Not to mention it's easy to run stable diffusion, but midjourney is still a good business. I can run sd on my laptop, I still pay for midjourney because it's convenient, the out of the box experience is better than any competition, and it kee…

The reason why proprietary software ever had a moat simply comes down to: software startups could dump investment capital onto the development process and achieve results much faster, with better user interfaces, allowing them to achieve path dependence in their customer base. Thus we had a few big application verticals that were ultimately won by MS Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc.

If the result here is as marginal as it seems - a few months of advantage in output quality and a slightly more sleek UI - the capital-intensive play doesn't work. The featuresets that industrial users want the most depend on having more control over the stack, not on UI or output quality. The open source models are stepping up to this goal of "cheap and custom". Casual users can play with the open models without much difficulty either, provided they take a few hours to work through an installation tutorial - UI isn't a major advantage when the whole point is that it's a magic black box.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#373
post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

GPT-4 is so much better for complex tasks that I wouldn't use anything else. Trying to get 3.5 to do anything complicated is like pulling teeth, and using something worse than 3.5... Oof. TBH this feels like cope from Google; Bard is embarrassingly bad and they expected to be able to compete with OpenAI. In my experience, despite their graph in the article that puts them ahead of Vicuna-13B, they're actually behind..…

GPT-4 is a must if tool using is your goal.

GPT-3.5, I think it is mostly suitable for:

1. Quick documentation lookup for non-essential facts

2. Lightweight documents writing and rewriting

3. Translation

Other use cases should go straightly to GPT-4

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#374

I remember I was at Microsoft more than a decade ago now and at the time there was a lot of concern about search and how far Bing lagged behind Google in geospatial (maps). After some initial investment in the area I was at a presentation where one of the higher ups explained that they'd be abandoning their investment because Google Maps would inevitably fall behind crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap. Just like Encarta…

I think the difference is that Maps is a product and its hard to copy a whole product and make it good without someone driving the vision. But a model is just a model, in terms of lines of code they aren't even that large. Sure the ideas behind the are complicated and take a lot of thought to come up with, but just replicating it or iterating it is obviously not the challenging based on recent developments.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#375
post #81

The part of the post that resonates for me is that working with the open source community may allow a model to improve faster. And, whichever model improves faster, will win - if it can continue that pace of improvement. The author talks about Koala but notes that ChatGPT is better. GPT-4 is then significantly better than GPT-3.5. If you've used all the models and can afford to spend money, you'd be insane to not use…

This is what happened with kubernetes no? Open source was about to take over so google release the code not to loose out.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some really high quality internal discussions at tech companies, unfortunately they are suffering from leaks due to their size and media have realized it’s really easy to just take their internal content and publish it. It really sucks because there’s definitely a chilling effect knowing any personal opinion expressed in text at a big tech company could end up in a headline like “GOOGLE SAYS ” because of a l…

This is exactly that. This doc is apparently a leaked internal doc.

I know that, my point is that it’s not indicating anything nefarious enough to be worth exposing, it’s just juicy.

I don’t think the media should share stuff like this just because it’s interesting. They’re making a market for corporate espionage to sell clicks.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Midjourney is more popular (from what I'm seeing) than Stable Diffusion at the moment because it's better at the moment. Midjourney is closed-source. Midjourney is easier, its not better. The low barrier to entry has it popular, but it isnt as realistic, doesnt follow the prompt as well, and has almost no customization. SD is the holy grail of AI art, if you can afford a computer or server to run SD + have the abili…

> Midjourney is easier, its not better. By what measure? Midjourney v5 is massively better with every prompt topic I've thrown at it than SD. It's not even close. SD, however, is much better if you want an actual customizable toolchain or to do things like train it on your own face/character.

Agreed. I pay for MJ and have several SD versions running on my PC. I like the ability to fine tune the SD models and my Pc with a 4090 is plenty fast, but I can't match MJ's output on artistic quality. SD allows for 4k sized outputs which is great but I can't use the art like I would like. FWIW the SD NSFW community is large but that is not where I invest my time with AI art.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#379

So I use ChatGPT every day. I like it a lot and it is useful but it is overhyped. Also from 3.5 to 4 the jump was nice but seemed relatively marginal to me. I think the head start OpenAi has will vanish. Iteration will be slow and painful giving google or whoever more than enough time to catch up. ChatGPT was a fantastic leap getting us say 80% to Agi but as we have seen time and time again the last 20% are excruciat…

I also felt this way initially, like "that's it?". But overall the massive reduction in hallucinations and increase in general accuracy makes it almost reliable. Math is correct, it follows all commands far more closely, can continue when it's cut off by the reply limit, etc.

Then I tried it for writing code. Let's just say I no longer write code, I just fine tune what it writes for me.

Re: Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Midjourney is more popular (from what I'm seeing) than Stable Diffusion at the moment because it's better at the moment. Midjourney is closed-source. Midjourney is easier, its not better. The low barrier to entry has it popular, but it isnt as realistic, doesnt follow the prompt as well, and has almost no customization. SD is the holy grail of AI art, if you can afford a computer or server to run SD + have the abili…

I just want to add my $0.02 currently working at a games studio that is integrating AI generated art into our art pipelines. Midjourney definitely generates really high quality art based on simple prompts, but the inability to really customize the output basically kills its utility. We heavily use Stable Diffusion with specific models and ControlNet to get customizable and consistent results. Our artists also need to…

If you would give a talk about this, I would watch it - despite being out of the graphics for almost 10 years now. Really want to hear from the trenches about the workflows, benefits and challenges you have.
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