Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

daringfireball.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 323 posts

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#61

Post by nick3443 »

phodo wrote: post #57
toddmorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or…

What if the AGI takes an entire data center to process a few tokens per second. Is the still a first-arriver advantage? Seems like the first to make it cheaper than an equivalent-cost employee (fully loaded incl hiring and training) will begin to see advantage.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#62

Post by YetAnotherNick »

> There is no technical moat in this field

This is getting so repetitive now that it is stated as a truism.

Isn't it the same bet yahoo was betting on in 2000 that it would win because their product branding is better? And now, Yahoo's and Microsoft's search engine is worse than Google from 2 decades ago.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#63

Post by jsheard »

Correction: all they need to succeed is unimaginable sums of money and the ironclad right to assimilate every work ever created by humanity without compensation. Who could refuse such a modest request?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-...

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#64

Post by dartos »

phodo wrote: post #57
toddmorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or…

None of that would matter if they could find the holy grail though.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#65

Post by mrbungie »

bravura wrote: post #35

People keep saying stuff like this, but I don't believe it: "There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble." AI progress is driven by strong valuable data. Detailed important conversation with a chatbot are much more valuable that quick search queries. As LLMs extend past web UIs, there is even more interaction data to capture and learn from. The company that capture…

Data is becoming a commodity in this regard. That can't be really their moat when Google, Anthropic, etc are publishing similar products.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#66

Post by scarmig »

nick3443 wrote: post #61
phodo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or…

What if the AGI takes an entire data center to process a few tokens per second. Is the still a first-arriver advantage? Seems like the first to make it cheaper than an equivalent-cost employee (fully loaded incl hiring and training) will begin to see advantage.

Depending on how powerful your model is, a few tokens per second per data center would still be extraordinarily valuable. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a next generation super intelligence could be trained with a couple hundred lines of pytorch. If that's the case, a couple tokens per second per data center is a steal.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#67

Post by Scaevolus »

phodo wrote: post #57
toddmorey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

One view is that it’s not first mover, but first arriver advantage. Whoever gets to AgI (the fabled city of gold or silver?, Ag pun intended) will achieve exponential gains from that point forward, and that serves as the moat in the limit. So you can think of it as buying a delayed moat, with an option price equivalent to the investment required until you get to that point in time. Either you believe in that view or…

Exponential gains from AGI requires recursive self improvement and the compute headroom to realize them. It's unclear if current LLM architectures make either of those possible.

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#69

Post by abc-1 »

numpy-thagoras wrote: post #14

OpenAI's engineers: brilliant, A+, A* even. OpenAI's C-suite: Well, they earned the C, but it was a letter grade. What a profoundly unimaginative strategy. No matter the industry, a large-scale diversion of resources towards a moonshot goal will likely get you to that goal. They haven't made an argument as to why we should do that just for them, especially with all of the other alternatives. And no, advertising your…

> OpenAI's engineers: brilliant, A+, A* even.

Then why do they look about average to Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, and many others of that cohort despite having x100 the amount of resources?

Re: OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’

#70

Post by CamperBob2 »

toddmorey wrote: post #40
cs702 wrote: post #21

This rings true to my ears: > There is no technical moat in this field, and so OpenAI is the epicenter of an investment bubble. Thus, effectively, OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution. The revolution is real, but it’s ultimately going to be a commodity technology layer, not the foundation of a defensible proprietary moat. In 1995 investors mistakenly…

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI. They feel interchangeable like bandwidth providers and seem like it will be a never ending game of leapfrog. I thought perhaps we’d end up with a small set of few top players just based on the scale of investment but now I’ve also seen impressive gains from much smaller companies & models, too.

Genuinely curious if anyone has ideas how an LLM provider could moat AI.

Patents. OpenAI already has a head start in the game of filing patents with obvious (to everybody except USPTO examiners), hard-to-avoid claims. E.g.: https://patents.google.com/patent/US12008341B2

Post reply on HN