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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#411

Post by lelanthran »

energy123 wrote: post #87
sinenomine wrote: post #13

People underestimate the lead OAI has with their post-5.2 models. The author does not strike me as someone who closely follows the progress frontier labs make in US and around the world.

It's a joint ignorance of how these frontier models get baked and what consumers want. Many pundits think it's just a matter of scraping the internet and having a few ML scientists run ablation experiments to tune hyperparameters. That hasn't been true for over a year. The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat. The main legitimate competitive threat is adversarial distillation. Ma…

> The current requirements are more org-scale, more payoff from scale, more moat.

What moat? None of the AI providers have a moat at the moment, and the trend doesn't indicate that any of them will in the near future.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#412

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

hereonout2 wrote: post #240
candu wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but people have hundreds and thousands on conversation on these apps that can't be easily moved elsewhere. Except these aren't conversations in the traditional sense. Yes, there's the history of prompts and responses exchanged. But the threads don't build on each other - there's no cross-conversational memory, such as you'd have in a human relationship. Even within a conversation it's mostly stateless, sending the…

This is not the case. I use OpenAI a lot on the paid plan via the UI. It now knows absolutely loads about me and seems to have a massive amount of cross conversational memory. It's really getting very close to what you'd expect from a human conversation in this regard. Sure the model itself is still stateless, and if you use the API then what you say is true. But they are doing so much unseen summarisation and longer…

> It now knows absolutely loads about me

Baffled that someone tech literate would be boasting about this in the year 2026. I mean, you do you, we all have different priorities and threat vectors, but this is the furthest from what I would personally want.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#413

Post by XCSme »

selkin wrote: post #163
XCSme wrote: post #55

Same question for Atrophic. Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.

X has only brand recognition right now, and an extremely toxic one. Big customers may buy but won't give them logos, people who are offended by Musk's worldview won't pay them either. You don't do well with a toxic brand: just look at Ye having to buy full page apologies ads to try and sell a record.

X?

Don't they have the biggest budget and largest GPU farm?

Also grok-4.1-fast was one of the top models for a long time, especially in real world usage.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#414

Post by frde_me »

owebmaster wrote: post #335
sauercrowd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tide seems to be shifting on codex, but also lets not forget openai has a brand that none of the others have - it's _the_ AI. Sure Google can go against that, but it's openai is definitely in a much better spot. It's pretty important for a consumer market.

This thing about openai brand is changing fast. In the dev circles I'm part of, everybody dislikes OpenAI and prefer Claude. How long it'll take for the same to happen with the normies?

You see, in my circles (me included), people are shifting _to_ codex since 5.3 codex came out.

The only places where I hear people say claude is better is: - Frontend design - Random computer use tasks

But people trust codex for large scale architecture and changes

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#415

Post by XCSme »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #364
XCSme wrote: post #55

Same question for Atrophic. Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.

It's funny you say that, I thought this would be an article about how Anthropic have managed to produce a better (coding) product than OpenAI despite having 1/10th of the funding. The new versions of Opus (4.5 and 4.6) are absolutely amazing - first time I've felt it necessary to throw hundreds of dollars in a single month at Cursor. I heard similar things about the older models too (Sonnet 3.5 beating GPT-4 etc.) bu…

The problem is not the models, is the moat and budget. Google and X still have money and are profitable, all the other AI companies are losing billions per year.

And customers will happily switch from one model to another in a heartbeat.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#416

Post by lelanthran »

XCSme wrote: post #55

Same question for Atrophic. Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.

> Personally I only see Google (Gemini), X (Grok) and the Chinese models having a chances to still be alive in 1-2 years.

I'd make it more general - the only AI tokens providers that will last past the bubble are those companies that are already self-sustaining via other product channels.

Any company that has AI as their one and only product aren't going to survive.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#417

Post by Schlagbohrer »

agentifysh wrote: post #100

I think this is the best article on open AI that I've ever read. A lot of content these days will try to paint OpenAI in sensational ways that really doesn't get to the bottom of whether open AI has an economic mode, and this article does a very thorough job of explaining why OpenAI doesn't have power like the other platforms. And so this goes back to my theory that open AI's execution is basically to get it itself i…

Altman said that in an interview, that the government would bail out OpenAI.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#418

Post by cmrdporcupine »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #343
daxfohl wrote: post #130

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.

Coding, via something like Claude or Codex, will likely always be something best done by hosted cloud models simply because the bar there can always be higher. But it's already entirely possible to run local models for chat and research and basic document creation that can compete perfectly fine with the cloud models from 6 months to a year ago. The limitation at this point is just the cost of RAM.

This week's released of the new smaller Qwen 3.5 models was interesting. I ran a 4-bit quant of the 122b model on my NVIDIA Spark, and it's... pretty damn smart. The smaller models can be run at 8-bits on machines at very reasonable speeds. And they're not stupid. They're smarter than "ChatGPT" was a year or so ago.

AMD Strix Halo machines with 128GB of RAM can already be bought off the shelf for not-insane prices that can run these just fine. Same with M-series Macs.

Once the supply shocks make their way through the system I could see a scenario where it's possible that every consumer Mac or Windows install just comes with a 30B param or even higher model onboard that is smart enough for basic conversation and assistance, and is equipped with good tool use skills.

I just don't see a moat for OpenAI or Anthropic beyond specialized applications (like software development, CAD, etc). For long-tail consumer things? I don't see it.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#419

Post by Lorkki »

oblio wrote: post #133
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're right about stickyness up to a point. Cultural defaults seem unchangeable but then suddenly everyone knows, that's everyone knows, that OpenAI is passé. OpenAI has a real chance to blow their lead, ending up in a hellish no-man's land by trying to please everyone: Not cool enough for normies, not safe enough for business, not radical enough for techies. Pick a lane or perish. Not owning their own infra…

> Being a first mover doesn't guarantee getting to the golden goose, remember MySpace. MySpace, ICQ, Altavista, Dropbox, Yahoo, BlackBerry, Xerox Alto, Altair 8800, CP/M, WordStar, VisiCalc, the list is very long.

IBM owned literally the whole market on computers at a time when computing equipment was prohibitively expensive and centralised.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#420

Post by skepticATX »

danny_codes wrote: post #90
theptip wrote: post #24

I think this take underestimates a couple points: 1) the opportunities for vertical integration are huge. Anthropic originally said they didn’t want to build IDEs, then realized the pivot to Claude Code was available to them. Likewise when one of these companies can gobble up Legal, Medical, etc why would they let companies like Harvey capture the margins? 2) oss models are 6-12 months behind the frontier because of…

The question is always about performance plateau. If LLM performance plateaus, then OSS models will catch up. If there isn’t a plateau, then I can simply ask the super intelligent AI to distill itself, or tell me how to build a clone. It’s ironic, if the promise of AGI were realized, all knowledge companies, including AI companies, become worthless

I actually think that plateauing is the best case scenario for big labs.

I think there are three broad scenarios to consider:

- Super-intelligence is achieved. In this scenario the economics totally break down, but even ignoring that, it’s hard to imagine that there are any winners except for the the singular lab that gets here first.

- Scaling laws hold up and models continue to get better, but we never see any sort of “takeoff”. In this scenario, models continue to become stale after mere months and labs have to spend enormous amounts of money to stay competitive.

- Model raw capabilities plateau. In this scenario open source will catch up, but labs will have the opportunity to invest in specific verticals.

I believe that we’re already seeing the third scenario play out, but time will tell.

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