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How will OpenAI compete?

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Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#611

Post by rkomorn »

matthewkayin wrote: post #609
azan_ wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not anymore (actually google is awful now) and people are still using it

I've been feeling the pain of google being awful for a while now. Do you have a different search engine you would recommend?

I used Kagi for several months, I guess I'd at least recommend trying it out.

I stopped using it, though, and I can't honestly say I've missed it. It was nice not having sponsored results, I guess, but overall it didn't feel like a transformative experience.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#612

Post by basch »

strangegecko wrote: post #542
basch wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Model training is completely different than keeping a summary of chats on the side and injecting it as context. In my Gemini app, when k click new chat and click the filters button I have “Personalize Intelligence: Personalize chat when helpful.” It is on every time I click new chat. Maybe you need to enable it in settings first. I can disable it to have a clean chat without personal context, but preserve the chat hi…

I understand they are separate processes (compacting memories vs training new models), it just surprised me to read that my chats are used for training. This is how it's presented: "Temporary chats Opens in a new window don't appear in Recent Chats Opens in a new window or Gemini Apps Activity Opens in a new window and aren't used to train models or personalize your experience." I'm guessing you're maybe on iOS? I do…

I have them in the web as well.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#613

Post by singleshot_ »

DrScientist wrote: post #454
shubhamjain wrote: post #29

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…

So in summary OpenAI are basing their valuation of 285 billion on the moat of 'users won't be arsed to download a different app'??? Seems optimistic when there is very little intrinsic stickness due to learning the UI or network effects. Perhaps a little bit chat history - but not 285 billions worth. Also completely ignoring the fact that most devices things will start to come with the same features directly built in…

Directing your attention to Coca-Cola

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#614

Post by kbelder »

matwood wrote: post #238
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…

I see people who have conversations spanning months. They don't start new threads and instead go back to existing threads to continue the topic. They also reference the prior threads discussion many times. This would feel like a switching cost for people who use the system that way.

They need to do some sort of shared chat. Like being able to start a thread then invite another chatGPT user to join on the conversation. That would add some network effects and switching cost.

Maybe they already have this? I'm not a paid user.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#615

Post by amelius »

barrkel wrote: post #426
amelius wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the point is that at a certain amount of neurons your AI will not get appreciably smarter, just more knowledgeable (and more costly). At least to the majority of users this will be true. The knowledge part can then be outsourced to search engines, to make it cheaper.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#616

Post by adventured »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #606
parliament32 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product. I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual sticky…

You say 5% of users pay like it’s a shockingly bad number, but that’s almost exactly the same as YouTube’s paid subscribers (125m) vs MAUs (2.5b). Like it or not, OpenAI is building a real business. It’s obviously capital intensive, but we will see how it goes. And no, the vast majority will not migrate. Just like the vast majority didn’t migrate away from Google after they launched ads. I don’t get the HN urge to be…

OpenAI is sitting on top of a $100+ billion ad revenue business just waiting to happen. Those 95% of users not paying anything are about to start paying something.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#617

Post by barrkel »

amelius wrote: post #615
barrkel wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the point is that at a certain amount of neurons your AI will not get appreciably smarter, just more knowledgeable (and more costly). At least to the majority of users this will be true. The knowledge part can then be outsourced to search engines, to make it cheaper.

Search engines are more costly than inference AIUI and are certainly slower. The models are very expensive to train of course and incremental learning without catastrophic forgetting hasn't been solved. I would think whoever cracks could be in a better position than someone who must search all the time.

Concrete example: I had a very frustrating time recently installing Gerrit and jujutsu (jj) using ChatGPT for advice. It persistently gave me outdated info and I had to tell it to search multiple times in a single conversation. Its trained in info was out of date, but it didn't realize it, hadn't internalized it, despite being reminded over and over in one conversation.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#618

Post by reducesuffering »

joefourier wrote: post #421
daxfohl wrote: post #154

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.

You're not thinking of the second order meta system here. ASI isn't just one instance of an LLM responding to you in a session. It's the datacenter full of millions of LLM interacting with millions in parallel.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#619

Post by kbelder »

UltraSane wrote: post #189
pllbnk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT has a good name. It's weird and awkward but it still rolls off the tongue. And I am saying that as a non native English speaker because the name has been migrated to other languages with the English pronunciation. In comparison, Claude's name is very bad, it just doesn't sound right and people might mishear me when I say it. I never say "Claude" when talking to other, especially non-technical people, and inst…

Claude is a terrible name but Gemini is pretty good.

Names-wise, I think 'Grok' is pretty good, there's just lots of other baggage that comes along with it.

I still hate how Microsoft ruined the value in the name 'Cortana'. If they had a modern LLM named Cortana with the right voice, I'd be very tempted to use it just because. What other LLM has a face associated with it?

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#620

Post by rrr_oh_man »

chii wrote: post #86
ryanlitalien wrote: post #45

I speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.

> said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere. i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.

> i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

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