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OpenAI is too cheap to beat

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Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#401

Post by pnt12 »

jejeyyy77 wrote: post #84
serjester wrote: post #55

I think this is under appreciated. I run a "talk-to-your-files" website with 5ish K MRR and a pretty generous free tier. My OpenAI costs have not exceeded $200 / mo. People talk about using smaller, cheaper models but unless you have strong data security requirements you're burdening yourself with serious maintenance work and using objectively worse models to save pennies. This doesn't even consider OpenAI continuous…

how do ur customers feel about you uploading potentially confidential documents to a 3rd party?

Ifnyoure a big company dealing with Microsoft , you're not just going to "pay as you go". You'll have a sales rep, dedicated support, custom contracts and special prices. In the contract, Microsoft just needs to promise they won't share your data ever: if they do, the company can sue.

Microsoft is a behemoth at dealing with enterprises and has been doing it for decades. Even old school enterprises are OK with uploading data to Azure.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#402

Post by htrp »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #257
outlace wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But OpenAI appears to have some sort of data moat. I doubt their model is the best in the world, but more/better data generally beats better model, and GPT-4 definitely beats Claude, Bard, Bernie and the rest probably because they curated the best quality and largest data set. Maybe that moat doesn't last long but perhaps they have exclusive rights to some of that dataset through commercial agreements that could be a…

I'd bet that there are any number of submarine startups out there sitting on top of full downloads of Common Crawl, archive.org, etc. who are only too happy to let OpenAI be the first penguin off the iceberg. If OpenAI survives all the legal challenges, they'll just click "Go" and be in business in weeks to months. If OpenAI gets smacked down, they haven't lost much. There are probably also some submarine operations…

>submarine startups out there sitting on top of full downloads of Common Crawl, archive.org, etc. who are only too happy to let OpenAI be the first penguin off the iceberg.

Not sure any startup would be ok with sitting on a potentially gamechanging model.

Google/Facebook? Maybe?

Amazon's LLM efforts are pretty much in shambles

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#403

Post by mark_l_watson »

Great HN thread! I think it is close to impossible to predict where the market for AI and LLMs in particular will be in two years. The major players are making their best bets. For the value of frontier LLMs, the article by Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Peter Norvig making the case that we might already have AGI: https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

I use both OpenAI and Anthropic (I use my own Common Lisp and Racket Scheme client libraries that I implement with similar APIs) and I was amazed last night how well self hosted LLama-based and Mistral LLMs run on a 32G Mac Mini that was delivered to me late yesterday afternoon. This is not expensive hardware. And tools like llama.cpp will keep getting more efficient, etc.

We are going to see unimaginable (at least to me) advances in AI and AGI, at all levels of the tech food chain. And these advances will occur quickly. Place your bets, and remain flexible!

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#404

Post by vikramkr »

pleoxy wrote: post #336
vikramkr wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you do it for a simple webapp? Genuine question

Ingress that handles SSL. nginx, or caddy. Then stand up your app server behind that on the same VM. Database can be on the same or different VM. I try to not use anything else if I can avoid it on a new project. Ingress gives you the ability to load balance and is threaded and will scale with network transfer and cpu. Database should scale with a bump in VM specs as well, CPU and disk IOPS. If you keep your app serv…

No that's all fine, I mean physically, where would I put a server and stuff if we didn't have cloud providers? I'd need to pay an isp for an IP address and maybe port forward and stuff like that right? I don't get why I wouldn't just do what you mentioned on a five dollar digital ocean droplet or an ec2 instance or whatever, the cloud still seems orders of magnitude easier to get off the ground.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#405

Post by CamperBob2 »

freedomben wrote: post #202
smoldesu wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's shitty and has no excuse, but the parent is right. Apple has no incentive to respond to their users since all roads lead to first-party Rome. It's why stuff like the Digital Market Act is more needed than some people claim. You know what would get Apple to fix this? Forced competition. You know what Apple spends their trillions preventing?

agreed. I'm not trying to "excuse" shitty work, merely observing the incentives/pressures on them. We can complain about it all we want, but we won't understand it until we understand the incentives.

I think that's a bit glib. Right now it's true that nobody's going to leave the Apple camp because of Siri, but it's also true that nobody's going to leave the Android camp because of it. That state of affairs could change.

It's not a time for complacency, if only because driver assistance is becoming more important every day. There are good, sound business reasons to put competent people on the Siri team.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#406

Post by sangnoir »

7speter wrote: post #372
sangnoir wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But OpenAI appears to have some sort of data moat. I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that Google and Facebook have at least one, possibly 2 or more orders of magnitude more latent training data to work with - not including Googles search index. My uninformed opinion is that Google and Meta's ML efforts are fragmented - with lots of serious effort going into increasing existing revenue streams with LLMs and th…

I think threads is a cover to get more natural language data from actual people for free, but maybe I’m wrong

Facebook.com already has decades-worth of natural language text and audio/video from uploads and "live" sessions. That is a deep pool, and wide too because Facebook probably has content in all currently-spoken natural languages, with the exception of those exclusively used by uncontacted peoples. That is a data moat.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#407

Post by zarzavat »

omeze wrote: post #286
mbb70 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's exactly what they have: millions of high quality, rated chat interactions that no one else has. I don't know how they could _not_ incorporate customer usage to improve their models.

well, this assumes the chat (where the ratings are given) is what people are using and paying for. I think most businesses pay for some combination of API access and specific use cases like code generation (at least, thats what I pay for) that don't really impact RLHF data. General search for consumers is likely to schism since chatGPT isn't especially different from Bard or Edge's AI assistant or the myriad of other…

Yes the chat interactions don’t help with capability (what it can do) they only help with alignment (what it should do). And you don’t need a lot to get good results. Crowdsourcing will be enough.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#408

Post by zarzavat »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #306
zarzavat wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being ahead in a race doesn’t mean you’re going to win. Open source models will win eventually because they have the lowest marginal cost to run. People will figure out what OpenAI is doing and duplicate it. There’s many people working at OpenAI, it’s going to leak out.

Did you even read my comment? I specifically highlighted why openai might be cheaper in long run. One is they are already working on a chip that would be better just for running a single model.

They are not going to beat NVIDIA. Making a chip for one model is not really a good idea, there are more efficiency gains to be made by improving the model and using a general purpose AI chip, rather than keeping the model architecture static and building a special purpose chip for it. Regardless, whatever OpenAI can do, NVIDIA can do better, and on more recent process nodes because they have the volume.

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#409

Post by chrisgd »

latchkey wrote: post #16

I just paid the $20 for a month to try it out. In my super limited experience, GPT-4 is actually impressive and worth the money.

I have been struggling to understand the use case. Would you still be using it to ask questions and receive answers, you get the benefit of not having to go to their website and being able to use the GPT-4 model, or is there another use case for the API to return specific data?

Re: OpenAI is too cheap to beat

#410

Post by latchkey »

chrisgd wrote: post #409
latchkey wrote: post #16

I just paid the $20 for a month to try it out. In my super limited experience, GPT-4 is actually impressive and worth the money.

I have been struggling to understand the use case. Would you still be using it to ask questions and receive answers, you get the benefit of not having to go to their website and being able to use the GPT-4 model, or is there another use case for the API to return specific data?

Your comment reminds me a lot of how I felt when I was given my first email address in 1991 and didn't have anyone to send email to. Little did we all know how important email would become. =)

I'm forming a new company. I was asked for a single sentence to describe the company as well as a longer paragraph. I wrote the single sentence and then fed it into chat.openai.com ChatGPT 3.5 (before I paid) and asked for a longer version.

What it came up with was a bit too heavy on the adjectives (the tone was a bit too much marketing), but wow, it nailed it in terms general concepts about what I'm building. This was all without knowing anything about the business. I can easily edit it back down to an easier tone for people to digest.

When I fed the same input into ChatGPT4, the results were 100x better.

I also like to use it to summarize my thoughts. I can write down a bunch of unfiltered gibberish about how I'm feeling today and what I'm thinking. Feed it in and it'll give me a great summary of what I just said in a non-threatening and neutral tone. Having gone through a lot of professional therapy (and even being married to one in a past life), it feels a lot like that to me... except a lot less expensive.

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