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It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

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Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#91
post #86

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

The openai bet goes "within 4 years, we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us." Are they on track?

There's another important bit there: 'we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us and no-one else can compete with us on that'. I think both halves of that are questionable.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#92
The question is if the company can add more value to the models than someone else. I still see a lot of gaps in the ecosystem, eg evaluation/testing systems and integrations beyond chat interface and active control to get good results, not to mention other types of models that deal with 3d world or temporal data. There is an opportunity for an outsider to come and grab parts of the pie whilst the biggest are competing.

They do look like trying to grab the market with tooling but if you can use their tools (oss) and switch the models then where is the moat?

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#93

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

By 2020/2021 with the release of GPT-3, the trajectory of a lot of the most obvious product directions had already become clear. It was mainly a matter of models becoming capable enough to unlock them.

E.g. here's a forecast of 2021 to 2026 from 2021, over a year before ChatGPT was released. It hits a lot of the product beats we've come to see as we move into late 2025.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

(The author of this is one of the authors of AI 2027: https://ai-2027.com/)

Or e.g. AI agents (this is a doc from about six months before ChatGPT was released: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...)

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#94
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driver model. I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say Ora to Ingress) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not…

> I question this. Each vendor's offering has its own peculiar prompt quirks, does it not? Theoretically, switching RDBMS vendors (say oracle to postgres) was also "an afernoon's work" but it never happened. The minutia is sticky with these sort of almost-but-not 'universal' interfaces. The bigger problem is that there was never a way to move data between oracle->postgres in pure data form (i.e. point pgsql at your o…

The current LLMs support data export/import inherently because the interface is pure text.

All one needs to do is say something like “tell me all of personalization factors you have on me” and then just copy and paste that into the next LLM with “here’s stuff you should know about how to personalize output for me”

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#95

The current AI wave has been compared (by sama) to electricity and sometimes transistors. AI is just going to be in all the products. The trillion dollar question is: Do you care what kind of electricity you are using? So, will you care what kind of AI you are using. In the last few interviews with him I have listened to he has said that what he wants is "your ai" that knows you, everywhere that you are. So his game…

I mean don't you think this is is more analogous to the introduction of computing than electricity? If you told people in 1960 that there would be supercomputers inside people's refrigerators do you think they would have believed you?

And most people actually don't care what CPU they have in their laptop (enthusiasts still do which i think continues to match the analogy), they care more about the OS (chatGPT app vs gemini etc).

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#96

Platforms usually deliver significant value that is hard to replicate. OpenAI doesn't have any such thing. It's trivially replaced, and there's many competitors already. OpenAI is ahead of the curve, but they don't seem to have any particular way to do sticky capture. Migrating to a different LLM is an afternoon's work at most, not nearly the complexity of porting an app between OS' or creating a robust hardware driv…

The play OpenAI is making has nothing to do with the underlying models any more. They release good ones but it doesn't really matter, they're going for being the place people land when they open a web browser. That is incredibly sticky and not easily replaced. Being the company that replaces the phrase "oh just Google it" is worth half the money in the world, and I think they're well on their way to getting there.

I do say ChatGPT when referring to LLMs/genAI in general, but I do hate saying it as it is nowhere near as nice to say as "google". I will switch immediately once something better comes up.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#97

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

In late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to o…

I generally don't agree with him on much; it's just nobody really talks about how much money those companies burn, and are expected to burn, in bigger perspective.

For me 10 billion, 100 billion and 1 trillion are all very abstract numbers - until you show much unreal 1 trillion is.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#98
post #6
post #2

"[Microsoft's] platform power didn’t just come from controlling applications on top of Windows, but the OEM ecosystem underneath. If OpenAI builds AI for everyone, then they are positioned to extract margin from companies up-and-down the stack — even Nvidia. " Ah yes, the ChromeOS strategy. How'd that work out for Google? Building a platform is good, a way to make quite a bit of money. It's worked really well for Goo…

It worked great, Web is ChromeOS Platform for all practical purposes, with Firefox meagre 3%, and Safari only being relevant thanks to iOS, and the whole Electron crap as "native apps".

Whats more, every single child here in Australia is learning on a school issued Chrome Book. To my kids, a spread sheet is google sheets and a power point is google slides.

(We were joking about it just last week because my partner asked my eldest what was the Power Point he was working on and he said, "Whats Power Point?")

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#99

Can someone elucidate us as to how so many platforms (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc etc) all sprung up so quickly? How did the engineering teams immediately know how to go about doing this kind of tech with LLMs and DNNs and whatnot?

It's not much different to other ML, pretty much it's on a bigger and more expensive scale. So once someone figured out the rough recipie (NN architecture, ludicrous scale of weights and data, reinforcement learning tuning), it's not hard for other experts in the field to replicate, so long as they have the resources. Deepseek was pretty much a side project, for example.

Re: It's OpenAI's world, we're just living in it

#100

I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital,…

You could literally eliminate homelessness, world hunger, and fully pay health care costs in that same timeframe with much less cash.
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