4 ms·

This is a market grab. They are moving fast to capture the market. Being cheap allows them to capture the market faster. The main customers won’t be end users

• riku_iki 4y ago
  > their services with OpenAIs apis, they are unlikely to switch in the future. why is that? If competitor release better or cheaper LLM, it is not that hard to switch API calls..
  • nico 4y ago
    Sure, that’s the case if all your software does is make a couple of api calls and you have very few stake holders. But when you have built a big service around an external api, you have thousands or millions of users and thousands of employees - replacing an api is not just a big technical project, it’s also a huge internal political issue for the organization to rally the necessary teams to make the changes. People hate change, they actively resist it. The current environment is forcing companies to adapt and adopt the new technologies. But once they’ve done it, they’ll need an even bigger reason to switch apis.
• potatolicious 4y ago
  > "Being cheap allows them to capture the market faster." I think it's worth remarking that this is IMO a smarter way of using price to capture market than what we've seen in the post decade (see: Uber, DoorDash) - in OpenAI's case there's every reasonable expectation that they can drop their operating costs well below the low prices they're offering, so if they are running in the red the expectation of temporariness is reasonable. What was unreasonable about the past tech cycle is that a lot of the expectations of cost reduction a) never panned out, and b) if subjected to even slight scrutiny would never have reasonably panned out. OpenAI has direct line-of-sight to getting these models dramatically cheaper to run than now, and that's a huge benefit. That said I remain a bit skeptical about the market overall here - I think the tech here is legitimately groundbreaking, but there are a few forces working against this as a profitable product: - Open source models and weights are catching up very rapidly. If the secret sauce is sheer scale, this will be replicated quickly (and IMO is happening). Do users need ChatGPT or do they need any decently-sized LLM? - Productization seems like it will largely benefit incumbent large players (see: Microsoft, Google) who can afford to tank the operating costs and additional R&D required on top to productize. Those players are also most able to train their own LLMs and operate them directly, removing the need for a third party provider. It seems likely to me that this will break in three directions (and likely a mixture of them): - Big players train their own LLMs and operate them directly on their own hardware, and do not do business with OpenAI at any significant volume. - Small players lean towards undifferentiated LLMs that are open source and run on standard cloud configurations. - Small players lean towards proprietary, but non-OpenAI LLMs. There's no particular reason why GCP and AWS cannot offer a similar product and undercut OpenAI.
• layer8 4y ago
  > Once companies have integrated their services with OpenAIs apis, they are unlikely to switch in the future. The interface is so simple and maintains no long-term state that this doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Competitors will surely provide a “close enough” ChatGPT-compatible API, similar to how storage providers provide an S3-compatible API.
• bamboozled 4y ago
  Can't we just ask chatCPT to write the code to migrate to another provider for us?