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Having enough scale to perpetually offer free/low-cost compute is a moat. The primary reason ChatGPT went viral in the first place was because it was free, with no restrictions. Back in 2019, GPT-2 1.5B was made freely accessible by a single developer via the TalkToTransformers website, which was the very first time many people talking about AI text generation...then the owner got hit with sticker shock from the GPU…
Doesn't the sheer cost of training create a moat on its own?
I'll take the opposite side of that bet - MSFT / Goog / etc in the providers side will drive record revenues on the back of closed / restricted models:
1 - Table stakes for buying software at enterprise level is permissions based management & standardized security / hardening.
2 - The corporate world is also the highest value spender of software
3 - Corp world will find the "proprietary trained models" on top of vanilla MSFT OpenAI or Goog Bard pitch absolutely irresistible - creates a great story about moats / compounding advantages etc. And the outcome is going to most likely be higher switching costs to leave MSFT for a new upstart etc
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> artist whose domain has not yet been disrupted by AI fires artist in favor of AI
Everyone is getting disrupted by AI sooner or later. The trick is to use AI to do things it would take you five lifetimes to learn. It's a tool to lower opportunity cost, financial capital, and human capital. That gives anyone leveraging it a much bigger platform, and the ability to dream big without resources. If you can become your own "studio", you're the indie artist of the future. You don't need Disney or Univer…
Subcultures used to provide a counterbalancing force here, but they aren’t doing so well these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> artist whose domain has not yet been disrupted by AI fires artist in favor of AI
And the rest of the world was better off for it. If we'd prevented new technologies from influencing our artwork, our paintings would never have left the cave wall. I'm a musician with live published albums as well; if there comes a time when I think AI will help with my creative process, you can bet that I'll be using it.
Except the single mom in a studio apartment trying to get some pay from her art gigs.
My bet is that almost everyone wants to keep their options open.
I am very much into auxiliary tools like LangChain and LlamaIndex, the topic of my last book, but I also like building up my own tools from scratch (mostly in Common Lisp and Swift for now), and I bet most devs and companies are doing the same.
Note that this is a personal manifesto, which doesn't really represent Google's official stance. Which is unfortunate because I'm largely aligned with this position.