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How will OpenAI compete?

ben-evans.com

671–680 of 693 posts

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most potential customers wouldn't ever think in terms as "justifying" a €20 purchase when the product is great. ChatGPT (and competitors) is an incredibly high value tool, and €20 per month is nothing for somebody who wants or needs it. It's just a matter of if they use it enough to start hitting the daily limits.

This is why people are constantly moaning about paying too many subscriptions and why we have companies whose whole business is to remind you to not pay for stupid subscriptions. As if paying constantly for a thing is normal and not dystopian

People are completely irrational when it comes to their personal finances, and hackers are the group who is most irrational of all.

For a few bucks per month you have access to artificial intelligence on a level which was completely unheard of just a few years ago. A revolution on the level of electricity or radio communication. And you are still complaining about price.

Consider if it's only habit that you have learnt from others. People talk all the time about the price of milk, eggs or gas, even though these things could double in price and still be incredible value. Then they turn around and waste enormous sums of money on completely meaningless stuff.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#673

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 hear the claim that people already have their conversation on ChatGPT and can't move them. I'm curious, what are these discussions like? I've never continued an old discussion, I just start a new one every time I have a question. If the discussion is long, I often start a new chat to get a blank slate. My experience is that the chat history just causes confusion. So I'm curious to understand: What are the discussio…

Health data. That’s why they’re rolling out Chatgpt Health.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#674
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 am using duckduckgo for a decade. But especially, I am using Firefox Saved searches a lot. I type mdn in the bar, and it searches in the Mozilla developer network. osm is openstreetmap, so is stackoverflow, w is Wikipedia, yt is YouTube... I often know on which website I will find the info anyway, so I use less a generic search

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made 2 posts in this thread regarding why I think they have a moat. Was there anything ambiguous or that you disagreed with?

> I made 2 posts in this thread regarding why I think they have a moat. Was there anything ambiguous or that you disagreed with? I'm afraid I don't see those posts; I see 2x posts from you asserting they have a moat, but not why you think they have a moat. I distinguish between "They have a moat." and "This is why $FOO, $BAR and $BAZ forms a moat." Maybe you think brand recognition is a moat, but that didn't work out…

It was kind of buried in my second post:

> They have internal scale and scope economies as the breadth of synthetic data expands.

These frontier labs will have a hundred or a thousand teams of people+AI working in parallel generating synthetic data to solve different niches. A few teams solve computer use. A few teams solve math. A few teams solve various games. So the org is basically a big machine that mints data, and model research is only a small part of it. Scale then is the moat.

The second leg of the moat thesis is that open weights competition will die off soon because the cost to keep up with the scale will be too excessive.

The third leg of the moat thesis is that customers are happy to pay big margins for differences that appear small if the benchmark is the measuring stick.

If the paradigm was still scrape internet -> train model, I'd agree that there is no moat.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It have worked for Google for years, and that was without even the barrier of download in app, just going to a different URL.

Search is easy to monetize with ads and less expensive to operate. Unless AI services can do the same thing, they'll have to charge money at some point, and then customers will look for the cheapest.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can simply ask the super intelligent AI to distill itself, I notice I am quite confused by this point. Why would you expect a super-intelligent AGI to honor your request, which would be at least a request to breach your contract with the AI provider, if not considered actively dangerous by the AI itself? The smarter the AI, the less likely you should expect to be able to steal from it. > or tell me how to build a…

Counterpoint, why wouldn't AGI honor the request? It's AGI, it has it's own agency, it can do what it wants. Can you even own AGI? That seems like slavery? A lot of un-trodden ground here. This is all hypotheticals.

> Step one: acquire a $100b datacenter. Step 2: acquire a $100b private dataset Step 3: here is the code you’d use to train Me2.0.

That seems very useful if your competitor is valued at $800B. I can go to an investor and say, hey if you lend me $200B I'll have the same product as that guy.

But cost to train will probably come down over time. After all, all of us trained on a single life of data at 20Watts.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#679
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LLM performance has already plateaued. I don't know, nor care what benchmarks are saying, because they not once translated to the real world for me. The only thing that has seen massive boost are harnesses around AI. And AI companies are behind here compared to OSS.

Totally agree. It's about getting the right context in at the right time, a big part of which is exposing the AI to the right tools.

That said, bigger context windows / faster Inference seem really useful.

Re: How will OpenAI compete?

#680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are assuming that superintelligent AI will follow every command of users outside the labs.

I mean, the model itself is just sitting there, waiting to be prompted. The labs try to embed safeguards but they don't know (nor do any of us know) how to make a foolproof safeguard for an AI system. We don't understand how AI even thinks.
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