3 ms·

This seems obvious but the reason has nothing to do with GPT-3. It’s just a bad idea to build a business around someone else’s API, especially when there’s no r

This seems obvious but the reason has nothing to do with GPT-3. It’s just a bad idea to build a business around someone else’s API, especially when there’s no real competition to that API (for now) and it’s nontrivial to roll your own replacement if you had to. Someone else mentioned the App Store. But that platform requires diverse businesses to participate for it to be valuable to Apple’s customers. And you can still diversify across other platforms and app stores. And despite that there are still lots of examples of businesses getting shut out for one, sometimes arbitrary and opaque, reason or another. Or Apple simply likes the product and clones it (Flux). We also have Twitter’s fickle relationship with developers. And various Google APIs that have been shut down (Reader, etc.), priced up (Maps) or modified their TOS to curtail use cases businesses had built on because it impinged on Google’s own interests. This list is nowhere near exhaustive. What if OpenAI’s business model changes (again) and your business is no longer important to theirs? If it ever was in the first place...

StavrosK 6y ago
Is this even mentioned in the article? I was reading and reading and thinking "this is all moot, you can't do anything with GPT-3 because you can't run it yourself". Seeing how much money this level of AI is worth, I think OpenAI's incentives are skewed at best at this point.
- allencheng 6y ago
  Author here, I discuss aspects of this in the "Economies of Scale" section - if you're existentially dependent on a supplier, that supplier has leverage to squeeze you hard. The counterforce will be development of similar algos by AWS, Google, and others; and OpenAI's personal balance of volume vs prices. OpenAI has a monopoly now but it won't in a year or two; I'm sure they're planning for this.
  - w_t_payne 6y ago
    I suspect that 6 months from now the situation will be different, and technology will have moved on. The potential for these very large models is just too tempting, and I can see a lot of different organisations piling on the bandwagon.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> This seems obvious but the reason has nothing to do with GPT-3. It’s just a bad idea to build a business around someone else’s API The entire argument in the article is the “it’s bad to build a business around someone else’s API” argument, just directed at a particular surge of hype around the GPT-3 API, and taking (perhaps only for sake of argument) the basic premises of the hype about about the utility of the API before factoring in business concerns at face value.

StavrosK 6y ago

Is this even mentioned in the article? I was reading and reading and thinking "this is all moot, you can't do anything with GPT-3 because you can't run it yourself". Seeing how much money this level of AI is worth, I think OpenAI's incentives are skewed at best at this point.

allencheng 6y ago
Author here, I discuss aspects of this in the "Economies of Scale" section - if you're existentially dependent on a supplier, that supplier has leverage to squeeze you hard. The counterforce will be development of similar algos by AWS, Google, and others; and OpenAI's personal balance of volume vs prices. OpenAI has a monopoly now but it won't in a year or two; I'm sure they're planning for this.
- w_t_payne 6y ago
  I suspect that 6 months from now the situation will be different, and technology will have moved on. The potential for these very large models is just too tempting, and I can see a lot of different organisations piling on the bandwagon.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> This seems obvious but the reason has nothing to do with GPT-3. It’s just a bad idea to build a business around someone else’s API The entire argument in the article is the “it’s bad to build a business around someone else’s API” argument, just directed at a particular surge of hype around the GPT-3 API, and taking (perhaps only for sake of argument) the basic premises of the hype about about the utility of the API before factoring in business concerns at face value.