4 ms·
To me, your question seems to boil down to the economics of vertical integration. Two thoughts: First, GPT is all marginal cost, no fixed cost. So the margina
by tedsanders 4y ago
To me, your question seems to boil down to the economics of vertical integration.
Two thoughts:
First, GPT is all marginal cost, no fixed cost. So the marginal economics of 1 super app vs 10 specialized mini apps is roughly the same.
Second, imagine the same argument applied to a utility like electricity. "Why would any company pay for lightbulbs from one company, HVAC from a second company, and appliances from a third company?"
Early on, electricity was complicated and you might actually purchase all of these from the Edison Illuminating Company. But there are returns to specialization, and today the winning formula is different companies that specialize in each. The company best at manufacturing lightbulbs is not necessarily the company that is best at manufacturing washing machines.
Similarly, you could ask: "Why would any company pay for a laptop from one company, an operating system from a second company, and office apps from a third company?"
In some cases it may make sense to vertically integrate (e.g., Apple is happy to sell you a combined laptop + OS + Pages/Numbers), but in many cases the specialized players still do fine (e.g., you might buy a Dell laptop, a Microsoft OS, and Notion/Sheets).
So I think it's very much an open question as to whether the winning approach will be a Swiss army knife (single product) or a toolkit (multiple products).
- rcme 4y ago> Second, imagine the same argument applied to a utility like electricity. Isn’t that how electricity works? You purchase electricity directly from the producer, and buy additional plugins (literally) that work with the single source of electricity you’re purchasing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoThat would be akin to giving each of the 'plugins' your GPT API key and pay the usage bill directly to OpenAI. The plugin developers would still want $$$ for the app even if the GPT usage was excluded though.
- personjerry 4y agoWouldn't it be a one-time purchase then? "Buy my prompt for $10 that enables you to search your codebase" And we're back to Prompt Engineers :)
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 4y agoI think an IDE plugin or standalone app takes slightly more work than writing a prompt, but sure
- elecush 4y agoYes, prompt engineering is the future.
- bko 4y agoI think op means that a more general tool would cover all use cases. If there was a way to easily upload my code to the LLM and query it. At that point the service is providing a way to get your code to the LLM and a prompt, neither of which will be especially difficult in the future.
- danbala 4y agopretty quickly llvm/ai support is going to be more on the level of electricity itself. like a utility.
- DalasNoin 4y agoHave you tried just asking gpt4 to write a script that then implements the SAAS as a script that then calls gpt4? You should be careful about analogies, intelligence is special.
- ralfd 4y agoSlight nitpicking: Edison used lots of different companies for their own business cases and I think the Edison Illuminating Company only built electric generators. So indeed in the beginning of electricity, when the field was most untested/starting up, you did shop at special companies for a generator or lamps or whatever instead of using an integrated whole-in-one solution of a mega corp! Wikipedia: > Edison Lamp Company, a lamp manufacturer in East Newark, New Jersey; Edison Machine Works, a manufacturer of dynamos and large electric motors in Schenectady, New York; Bergmann & Company, a manufacturer of electric lighting fixtures, sockets, and other electric lighting devices; and Edison Electric Light Company, the patent-holding company and financial arm for Edison's lighting experiments These were only later consolidated into General Electric.