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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

421–430 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#421

Well there's the whole race to ASI thing. Whoever gets there first, the world is theirs. The thing will learn how learn, an intelligence feedback loop, make its own apps, find more efficient algorithms, deploy itself to more locations, bankrupt all competitors, embed itself in everyone's lives, and create a complete monopoly for the parent company that can never be touched. Until it goes rogue anyway. (Aside, it's in…

ASI still runs at finite speed and is limited by its hardware, and speed of its interactions with the real world. It won’t be able to recursively improve itself overnight if it only generates 10 tokens per seconds, and a second company could very well train one of its own before the first one has time to do much.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#422

Open AI seems to be jack of all trades.i randomly use chatgpt for random questions, never for a serious task. They should check how anthropic is laserfocussed on coding and b2b segment.

Codex 5.3 is way better than opus 4.6

My experience is completely the opposite. For generic, low-complexity CRUD tasks, Codex works fine. But when it comes to complex bug fixing, it completely fails, especially with middleware pipelines and complex authentication issues. Gemini also shines, codex is absolutely terrible for complex coding.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#423
post #133

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.

> the list is very long

Tesla is lurking as well

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#425
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will it do all these things? Many people say we’re at AGI already and I’m wondering why everyone hasn’t died yet.

> Many people say we’re at AGI already and I’m wondering why everyone hasn’t died yet. That’s like saying “many people say the Earth is flat and I’m wondering why anyone hasn’t fallen off the edge yet”. “Many people say” doesn’t translate to reality. Maybe AGI will kill us all, maybe it won’t (I think we’re doing a fine job of that ourselves, no need for a machine’s help), but we’re definitely not at AGI, except in t…

We are already at AGI. I don’t know how you can argue that LLMs don’t meet the definition of general artificial intelligence, as opposed to narrow AI like chess engines, image classifiers, AlphaGo or self driving cars, which are trained with one objective and cannot even possibly be applied to any other task.

People have just moved the goalposts, imagine explaining Opus 4.6’s capabilities to someone even 10 years ago, it would definitely have been called AGI.

I highly doubt there will be a point where everyone will agree that we’ve achieved ASI, there will always be a Gary Marcus type finding some edge case where it performs poorly.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#426
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 loca…

That's totally not my experience. The AI component (as opposed to the knowledge component) is really what makes these models useful, and you could add search as a tool. Of course for that you'll be dependent on a search provider, that's true.

You don't get the AI component without the knowledge component. The AI needs approximate knowledge of lots of things to conceptualize what you're talking about and use search tools effectively.

The set of things it needs approximate knowledge over grows slowly but noticeably over time.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#427

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…

I disagree (imo).

It would take me minutes to copy across a histories of projects and continue relatively unscathed by the experience.

I use chatGPT and currently relatively like it. But there is no moat beyond that.

Not like, for example, whatssap where it's almost impossible to detach from it due to the network ... (I've really tried with about a 10% success rate)

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#428
post #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 loca…

This is actually so ironic. Corporations spent fortunes to design cool websites, but what people really want is structured, easy to read information in the context they want.

So flow is you type search query to Gemini, Gemini uses Google search, scans few results, go to selected websites, see if there is anything relevant and then compose it into something structured, readable and easy to ingest.

It's almost like going back to 90s browsing through forums, but this time Gemini is generating equivalent of forum posts "on the fly".

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not boasting, I'm not sure why what I wrote would come across that way. I'm describing how I use a product and the functionality it presents to me.

But yes, it's an emerging area and I am questioning if I am sharing too much with it. I 100% would not want my chat histories exposed.

Saying that though, facebook can read my highly personal messages, google every email, my phone is tracking my every move, I have to sign up for random janky websites for my kids school where ther medical info is stored, etc.

LLM chat history presents a new risk and a different set of data, but it's a crowded minefield already.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#430
Hopefully this is on-topic: I would hope that some people would opt for private chat services. I evaluated both Proton’s Lumo+ and DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai services. I like both services but only wanted to pay for one and I chose Lumo+ because chat history is stored with my Proton data and is available in all my devices, Duck.ai stores chat history on current access device. Both services are also very usable with their free plans.

At least some of us in HN talk about limiting the data we give to Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. Isn’t it just as important to limit what we share with non-privacy preserving AIs?

Note: tech friends have asked me how I can use slightly weaker AI models and be happy about it: I still use Gemini Plus (and Anthropic via AntiGravity) for technical work: everything I do as a software developer is open source and all of my writing (20+ books) is Open Content so I don’t care about privacy and being direct-marketed based on my tech work. To me it makes sense to use the best AI just for tech work and a private AI for everything else. Think about this if a family member has a serious health problem, or something else private: do you want to use open web searches and open AI chats, or do you want to use private web search and private AI access? Why not make privacy your default, except in special situations?

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