3 ms·

Not sure the analogy holds up, if we are looking for an analogy, AlphaGo seems to work better: it was an impressive and unexpected stunt, for sure, but it wasn'

by c7b 3y ago

Not sure the analogy holds up, if we are looking for an analogy, AlphaGo seems to work better: it was an impressive and unexpected stunt, for sure, but it wasn't really clear how that would translate into business applications. ChatGPT is different, it's a business of its own right from the start, and it is its users who are falling over themselves thinking up new business applications, not just its creator. The bigger risk to OpenAI is that their moat looks increasingly shallow, more and more people are having success training their own models.

LeFantome 3y ago
The “moat” for Open AI is their relationship with Microsoft. The secret weapon for Microsoft is their association with ChatGPT. The two Will feed on each other. The “Open Source” ecosystem will drive the innovation and keep the technology in the news cycle and public mindshare. Many businesses will not or cannot pull technology out of the chaos of that world and will look to Microsoft. Google and Meta can incorporate this stuff into their other products but it is going to be harder for them to sell it directly.
- Slartie 3y ago
  This. People are perfectly able to install and run their own PostgreSQL databases, or Kafka brokers. The software is free and doesn't need much resources. Still, MSFT is selling its PostgreSQL-as-a-service and Not-quite-Kafka-but-similar-enough-as-a-service thing to a shit-ton of corporations which maybe once had the capability to host this for themselves, but have lost it while they migrated all of their stuff to the cloud. And they do so at a hefty premium. The same thing will happen to LLMs. Anyone will be able to run an own, custom-trained variant of sufficiently capable models on their own hardware. But most corporations will not do it. Just like they don't operate their own Kafka broker. They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters. And currently businesses largely believe that promise, which is why the MSFT/Azure connection is indeed the actual "moat" of OpenAI.
  - sshumaker 3y ago
    > They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters. In what way is this not true? Obviously there is no perfection here, only degrees of risk. But this is literally why people pick MSFT over others. They have by far the strongest culture around maintaining trust in the enterprise space.
- c7b 3y ago
  I agree that MS and Google in particular have incredible adoption levers by integrating them with their existing services. But there will still be a huge, probably bigger, market for integrating AI with other apps. Think about Copilot, in principle not even MS has a moat there, other than restricting VS Code plugins. And that's not even talking about building your own counseling/... app.

by c7b 3y ago

LeFantome 3y ago

The “moat” for Open AI is their relationship with Microsoft. The secret weapon for Microsoft is their association with ChatGPT. The two Will feed on each other. The “Open Source” ecosystem will drive the innovation and keep the technology in the news cycle and public mindshare. Many businesses will not or cannot pull technology out of the chaos of that world and will look to Microsoft. Google and Meta can incorporate this stuff into their other products but it is going to be harder for them to sell it directly.

Slartie 3y ago
This. People are perfectly able to install and run their own PostgreSQL databases, or Kafka brokers. The software is free and doesn't need much resources. Still, MSFT is selling its PostgreSQL-as-a-service and Not-quite-Kafka-but-similar-enough-as-a-service thing to a shit-ton of corporations which maybe once had the capability to host this for themselves, but have lost it while they migrated all of their stuff to the cloud. And they do so at a hefty premium. The same thing will happen to LLMs. Anyone will be able to run an own, custom-trained variant of sufficiently capable models on their own hardware. But most corporations will not do it. Just like they don't operate their own Kafka broker. They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters. And currently businesses largely believe that promise, which is why the MSFT/Azure connection is indeed the actual "moat" of OpenAI.
- sshumaker 3y ago
  > They will instead pay a lot for MSFTs cloud service offering, which of course comes with the crucial promise that their data is safe and secured and handled in a way that is compliant with all privacy laws. Which of course isn't true, but that doesn't matter, the promise is what matters. In what way is this not true? Obviously there is no perfection here, only degrees of risk. But this is literally why people pick MSFT over others. They have by far the strongest culture around maintaining trust in the enterprise space.
c7b 3y ago
I agree that MS and Google in particular have incredible adoption levers by integrating them with their existing services. But there will still be a huge, probably bigger, market for integrating AI with other apps. Think about Copilot, in principle not even MS has a moat there, other than restricting VS Code plugins. And that's not even talking about building your own counseling/... app.