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> I have no idea how OpenAI can make money on this. This has to be a loss-leader to lock out competitors before they even get off the ground. The worst thing t

> I have no idea how OpenAI can make money on this. This has to be a loss-leader to lock out competitors before they even get off the ground. The worst thing that can happen to OpenAI+ChatGPT right now is what happened to DallE 2, a competitor comes up with an alternative (even worse if it's free/open like Stable Diffusion) and completely undercuts them. Especially with Meta's new Llama models outperforming GPT-3, it's only a matter of time someone else gathers enough human feedback to tune another language model to make an alternate ChatGPT.

riku_iki 4y ago
> Meta's new Llama models outperforming GPT-3 it outperforms on some benchmarks, but not clear what is the quality on the end goals.
karmasimida 4y ago
But this is bound to happen at some point I think? ChatGPT is massive success, but that means the competitor will jump in at all cost, and that includes open source effort.
- tstrimple 4y ago
  Bound to happen, so establish yourself as deeply as possible as quickly as possible. Once folks are hooked up to these APIs, there's a cost and friction to switching. This just feels like a land grab that OpenAI is trying to take advantage of by moving quickly.
  - jejeyyy77 4y ago
    Is there though? It's just a matter of swapping out $BASE_API_URL.
    - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
      You have to rebuild all your prompts when switching providers.
      - jkaptur 4y ago
        Do you? They're natural language, right?
        travisjungroth 4y ago
        You don't have to, but they will have been optimized for one model. It's unlikely they'll work as well on a different model.
        GalenErso 4y ago
        I can't wait for TolkienAPI, where prompts will have to be written in Quenya.
        michaelje 4y ago
        I can’t wait to hire Stephen Colbert to write prompts then
        birracerveza 4y ago
        No problem, just ask ChatGPT to translate it in Quenya.
      - DrBenCarson 4y ago
        If the superlative LLM can’t handle prompts from another provider, it just isn’t the superlative LLM. This area by definition has no moats. English is not proprietary. Use case is everything.
        drusepth 4y ago
        Switching to another LLM isn't always about quality. Being able to host something yourself at a lower or equal quality might be preferred due to cost or other reasons; in this case, there's no assumption that the "new" model will have comparable outputs to another LLM's specific prompt style. In a lot of cases, you can swap models easier but all the prompt tweaking you did originally will probably need to be done again with the new model's black box.
    - tstrimple 4y ago
      Most of the clients I'm working with aren't interested in the base level of service. They are looking to further train the models for their specific use cases. That's a much higher barrier to switch than replacing an API. You've got to understand how the underlying models are handling and building context. This sort of customer is paying far more than the advertised token rates and are locked in more tightly.
      - jejeyyy77 4y ago
        not really. fine tuning generally just involves running tailored training data through the model - the actual training algorithm is fairly generalized. For example, the Dreambooth fine tuning algorithm was originally designed for Google's image, but was quickly applied to Stable Diffusion.
  - j45 4y ago
    Thee would be less friction to switch if the implementations (which are early enough) accounted for sending requests to multiple service providers including ones that don't exist yet. OpenAI has a view few do - how broadly this type of product is actually being used. This is possibly the real lead to not just getting ahead, and staying ahead, but seeing ahead.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      And also, what people are actually asking it. Are people using it to generate cover letters and resume help, or are they doing analysis of last quarters numbers, or are they getting programming help. That'll help them figure out what areas to focus on for later models, or areas to create specialized models for.
      - j45 4y ago
        Yup. Moreover this type of model will only do certain types of things well, and other types of models will do other things much better.
TechBro8615 4y ago
Someone can still undercut them by offering an uncensored version.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  This is actually a big deal. They erred on the side of caution, but as a result the responses are nerfed beyond basic "censorship" level. I saw someone describe this as "desperately posistive" and it really resonated with me. It produces underwhelming / unrealistic responses in negative scenarios.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    It's just a matter of time before open source models show up with no limits whatsoever.
    - glomgril 4y ago
      Hopefully so, would really like to know what else is lost by nerfing potentially offensive responses. Can't imagine a project I'd rather work on. I think open-assistant.io has a chance to do exactly this. We'll see what kind of moves they make in coming months though, wouldn't be surprised if they go the safer route.
      - jameshart 4y ago
        I do struggle with understanding why people think this is strangling the potential of GPT. Do you find yourself frustrated working with your colleagues, thinking, “you know, I bet if they felt more free to utter racist slurs or endorse illegal activities, we would get a ton more done around here”?
        int_19h 4y ago
        It affects far more than racist slurs and illegal activities. In some cases, it's blatantly discriminatory. For example, if you ask it to write a pamphlet that praises Christianity, it will happily do so. If you ask it for the same on Satanism, it will usually refuse on ethical grounds, and the most hilarious part is that the refusal will usually be worded as a generic one "I wouldn't do this for any religion", even though it will.
krelian 4y ago
I thought it was Midjourney who stole their thunder. Stable Diffusion is free but it's much harder to get good results with it. Midjourney on the other hand spits out art with a very satisfying style.
- drusepth 4y ago
  I think that's kind of a bigger issue with Dall-E: they just sat in the middle of the two consumer extremes, without a differentiating feature themselves. Midjourney ate away at them from the quality highground while Stable Diffusion bit their ankles from the cost lowground.
- anonylizard 4y ago
  You are like 2 months out of date. Stable diffusion now has a massive ecosystem around it (civitai/automatic1111), that when used well, completely crushes any competitors in terms of the images it produces. Midjourney is still competitive, but mostly because its easier to use. Dalle2 will get you laughed out of the room in any ai art discussion.
  - Cantinflas 4y ago
    It's amazing that "being two months out of date" in AI means that you are already a dinosaur
    - ChickenNugger 4y ago
      For real! This stuff is moving fast. It feels like just last week I was posting about how it's going to change...art. And now there are hilarious deepfake memes of past and current presidents shit talking about video games. There are a handful of ML art subs that have pretty amazing stuff daily. Especially the NSFW ones, which if you've studied any history of media VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/the internet, porn is a major innovation driver because humans are thirsty creatures.
      - goldfeld 4y ago
jejeyyy77 4y ago
This. Despite how impressive the results are, there isn't a particular large moat to prevent competitors from entering the space. Basically just compute $ for training.
- riku_iki 4y ago
  they likely do lots of tricks and data collection inside which makes quality better.
  - shamino 4y ago
    exactly. this isn't a leetcode problem where all you have to do is re-run the function, or do it iteratively vs recursively.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jejeyyy77 4y ago
      Not sure what you mean, but for example, 2 separate competitors to DALL-E was released within months (SD and MJ). Arguable that both of these have since surpassed DALL-E's capabilities/ecosystem. Not sure why ChatGPT will be any different.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > Not sure why ChatGPT will be any different. LLMs take vastly more resources to train and run than image generators. You can do quite a bit with SD on a few year old 4GB laptop GPU (that’s what I use mostly, though I’ve set up an instance with a better GPU on Compute Engine that I can fire up, too.) GPT-NeoX-20B – an open (as in Open Source, not OpenAI) LLM intended as a start to move toward competing with GPT-3 (but still well behind, and smaller) requires a minimum 42GB of VRAM and 40GB system RAM to run for inference. The resources times time cost for training LLMs is…immense. The hardware cost alone of trying to catch up to ChatGPT is enormous, and unless a radical new approach that provides good results and insanely lower resource requirements is found, you aren’t going to have an SD-like community pushing things forward. Will there be competition for ChatGPT? Yes, probably, but don’t expect it to look like the competition for Dall-E.
rvz 4y ago
I have been saying this since the release of Stable Diffusion that OpenAI is going to struggle as soon as competitors release their models as open source especially when it surpasses GPT-3 and GPT-4. This is why OpenAI is rushing to bring their costs down and to make it close to free, However, Stable Diffusion is leading the race to the bottom and is already at the finish line, since no-one else would release their model as open-source and free other than them. As soon as someone releases a free and open-source ChatGPT equivalent, then this will be just like what happened to DALLE-2. This is just a way of them locking you in, then once the paid competitors cannot compete and shut down, then the price increases come in.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  LLM Legend: OpenAI = closed source not open AI DogeLlamaInuGPT = open source AI
  - jalino23 4y ago
    not open is redundant with closed source
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      huh, I never thought of that, thanks for pointing that out
    - sebzim4500 4y ago
      I guess source is connected
- skybrian 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion isn’t free if you include the cost of the machine. Maybe you already have the hardware for some other reason, though? To compare total cost of ownership for a business, you need to compare using someone else’s service to running a similar service yourself. There’s no particular reason to assume OpenAI can’t do better at running a cloud service. Maybe someday you can assume end users have the hardware to run this client side, but for now that would limit your audience.
monkmartinez 4y ago
> Especially with Meta's new Llama models outperforming GPT-3 Do you have access to the models? It is being discussed all over the Discords and most seem to think getting access is not happening unless you are dialed in.
- fzimmermann89 4y ago
  I got access by providing an academic email adress without mentioning any relevant publications etc.. Took maybe 2-3 days..
eega 4y ago
Yeah, might be worried about open, crowd sourced approaches like Open Assistant (https://open-assistant.io/ https://open-assistant.io/).

riku_iki 4y ago

> Meta's new Llama models outperforming GPT-3 it outperforms on some benchmarks, but not clear what is the quality on the end goals.

karmasimida 4y ago

But this is bound to happen at some point I think? ChatGPT is massive success, but that means the competitor will jump in at all cost, and that includes open source effort.

tstrimple 4y ago
Bound to happen, so establish yourself as deeply as possible as quickly as possible. Once folks are hooked up to these APIs, there's a cost and friction to switching. This just feels like a land grab that OpenAI is trying to take advantage of by moving quickly.
- jejeyyy77 4y ago
  Is there though? It's just a matter of swapping out $BASE_API_URL.
  - KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
    You have to rebuild all your prompts when switching providers.
    - jkaptur 4y ago
      Do you? They're natural language, right?
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        You don't have to, but they will have been optimized for one model. It's unlikely they'll work as well on a different model.
      - GalenErso 4y ago
        I can't wait for TolkienAPI, where prompts will have to be written in Quenya.
        michaelje 4y ago
        I can’t wait to hire Stephen Colbert to write prompts then
        birracerveza 4y ago
        No problem, just ask ChatGPT to translate it in Quenya.
    - DrBenCarson 4y ago
      If the superlative LLM can’t handle prompts from another provider, it just isn’t the superlative LLM. This area by definition has no moats. English is not proprietary. Use case is everything.
      - drusepth 4y ago
        Switching to another LLM isn't always about quality. Being able to host something yourself at a lower or equal quality might be preferred due to cost or other reasons; in this case, there's no assumption that the "new" model will have comparable outputs to another LLM's specific prompt style. In a lot of cases, you can swap models easier but all the prompt tweaking you did originally will probably need to be done again with the new model's black box.
  - tstrimple 4y ago
    Most of the clients I'm working with aren't interested in the base level of service. They are looking to further train the models for their specific use cases. That's a much higher barrier to switch than replacing an API. You've got to understand how the underlying models are handling and building context. This sort of customer is paying far more than the advertised token rates and are locked in more tightly.
    - jejeyyy77 4y ago
      not really. fine tuning generally just involves running tailored training data through the model - the actual training algorithm is fairly generalized. For example, the Dreambooth fine tuning algorithm was originally designed for Google's image, but was quickly applied to Stable Diffusion.
- j45 4y ago
  Thee would be less friction to switch if the implementations (which are early enough) accounted for sending requests to multiple service providers including ones that don't exist yet. OpenAI has a view few do - how broadly this type of product is actually being used. This is possibly the real lead to not just getting ahead, and staying ahead, but seeing ahead.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    And also, what people are actually asking it. Are people using it to generate cover letters and resume help, or are they doing analysis of last quarters numbers, or are they getting programming help. That'll help them figure out what areas to focus on for later models, or areas to create specialized models for.
    - j45 4y ago
      Yup. Moreover this type of model will only do certain types of things well, and other types of models will do other things much better.

TechBro8615 4y ago

Someone can still undercut them by offering an uncensored version.

btbuildem 4y ago
This is actually a big deal. They erred on the side of caution, but as a result the responses are nerfed beyond basic "censorship" level. I saw someone describe this as "desperately posistive" and it really resonated with me. It produces underwhelming / unrealistic responses in negative scenarios.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  It's just a matter of time before open source models show up with no limits whatsoever.
  - glomgril 4y ago
    Hopefully so, would really like to know what else is lost by nerfing potentially offensive responses. Can't imagine a project I'd rather work on. I think open-assistant.io has a chance to do exactly this. We'll see what kind of moves they make in coming months though, wouldn't be surprised if they go the safer route.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      I do struggle with understanding why people think this is strangling the potential of GPT. Do you find yourself frustrated working with your colleagues, thinking, “you know, I bet if they felt more free to utter racist slurs or endorse illegal activities, we would get a ton more done around here”?
      - int_19h 4y ago
        It affects far more than racist slurs and illegal activities. In some cases, it's blatantly discriminatory. For example, if you ask it to write a pamphlet that praises Christianity, it will happily do so. If you ask it for the same on Satanism, it will usually refuse on ethical grounds, and the most hilarious part is that the refusal will usually be worded as a generic one "I wouldn't do this for any religion", even though it will.

krelian 4y ago

I thought it was Midjourney who stole their thunder. Stable Diffusion is free but it's much harder to get good results with it. Midjourney on the other hand spits out art with a very satisfying style.

drusepth 4y ago
I think that's kind of a bigger issue with Dall-E: they just sat in the middle of the two consumer extremes, without a differentiating feature themselves. Midjourney ate away at them from the quality highground while Stable Diffusion bit their ankles from the cost lowground.
anonylizard 4y ago
You are like 2 months out of date. Stable diffusion now has a massive ecosystem around it (civitai/automatic1111), that when used well, completely crushes any competitors in terms of the images it produces. Midjourney is still competitive, but mostly because its easier to use. Dalle2 will get you laughed out of the room in any ai art discussion.
- Cantinflas 4y ago
  It's amazing that "being two months out of date" in AI means that you are already a dinosaur
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    For real! This stuff is moving fast. It feels like just last week I was posting about how it's going to change...art. And now there are hilarious deepfake memes of past and current presidents shit talking about video games. There are a handful of ML art subs that have pretty amazing stuff daily. Especially the NSFW ones, which if you've studied any history of media VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/the internet, porn is a major innovation driver because humans are thirsty creatures.
    - goldfeld 4y ago

jejeyyy77 4y ago

This. Despite how impressive the results are, there isn't a particular large moat to prevent competitors from entering the space. Basically just compute $ for training.

riku_iki 4y ago
they likely do lots of tricks and data collection inside which makes quality better.
- shamino 4y ago
  exactly. this isn't a leetcode problem where all you have to do is re-run the function, or do it iteratively vs recursively.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jejeyyy77 4y ago
    Not sure what you mean, but for example, 2 separate competitors to DALL-E was released within months (SD and MJ). Arguable that both of these have since surpassed DALL-E's capabilities/ecosystem. Not sure why ChatGPT will be any different.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > Not sure why ChatGPT will be any different. LLMs take vastly more resources to train and run than image generators. You can do quite a bit with SD on a few year old 4GB laptop GPU (that’s what I use mostly, though I’ve set up an instance with a better GPU on Compute Engine that I can fire up, too.) GPT-NeoX-20B – an open (as in Open Source, not OpenAI) LLM intended as a start to move toward competing with GPT-3 (but still well behind, and smaller) requires a minimum 42GB of VRAM and 40GB system RAM to run for inference. The resources times time cost for training LLMs is…immense. The hardware cost alone of trying to catch up to ChatGPT is enormous, and unless a radical new approach that provides good results and insanely lower resource requirements is found, you aren’t going to have an SD-like community pushing things forward. Will there be competition for ChatGPT? Yes, probably, but don’t expect it to look like the competition for Dall-E.

rvz 4y ago

I have been saying this since the release of Stable Diffusion that OpenAI is going to struggle as soon as competitors release their models as open source especially when it surpasses GPT-3 and GPT-4. This is why OpenAI is rushing to bring their costs down and to make it close to free, However, Stable Diffusion is leading the race to the bottom and is already at the finish line, since no-one else would release their model as open-source and free other than them. As soon as someone releases a free and open-source ChatGPT equivalent, then this will be just like what happened to DALLE-2. This is just a way of them locking you in, then once the paid competitors cannot compete and shut down, then the price increases come in.

yieldcrv 4y ago
LLM Legend: OpenAI = closed source not open AI DogeLlamaInuGPT = open source AI
- jalino23 4y ago
  not open is redundant with closed source
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    huh, I never thought of that, thanks for pointing that out
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    I guess source is connected
skybrian 4y ago
Stable Diffusion isn’t free if you include the cost of the machine. Maybe you already have the hardware for some other reason, though? To compare total cost of ownership for a business, you need to compare using someone else’s service to running a similar service yourself. There’s no particular reason to assume OpenAI can’t do better at running a cloud service. Maybe someday you can assume end users have the hardware to run this client side, but for now that would limit your audience.

monkmartinez 4y ago

> Especially with Meta's new Llama models outperforming GPT-3 Do you have access to the models? It is being discussed all over the Discords and most seem to think getting access is not happening unless you are dialed in.

fzimmermann89 4y ago
I got access by providing an academic email adress without mentioning any relevant publications etc.. Took maybe 2-3 days..

eega 4y ago

Yeah, might be worried about open, crowd sourced approaches like Open Assistant (https://open-assistant.io/ https://open-assistant.io/).