3 ms·

You are correct that typically OSS is unable or unwilling to do “product,” largely because OSS in its raw form is in fact enough of a product for its main devel

by api 3y ago

You are correct that typically OSS is unable or unwilling to do “product,” largely because OSS in its raw form is in fact enough of a product for its main developer-user demographic. That being said I still see a much shallower moat here than there was in say Internet search. I can download a model in a few minutes. One could not download an entire web crawl index in any reasonable amount of time, nor could one update the index in real time continuously without enormous amounts of bandwidth and compute. DIY self hosted Google was to my knowledge barely even attempted due to the intrinsic difficulties. This stuff is also not about communication or sharing, areas where there are very strong network effect moats. It’s not chat or social media or collaborative office software. Generative AI is more like a stand alone application software. It can be hosted in the cloud but it’s easy to stand up competitors and it can be self hosted if you are willing to spring for the hardware. I’m not saying you won’t have big dominant players, just that I see more opportunity for competition and diversity here than for lots of other things.

yyyk 3y ago
>This stuff is also not about communication or sharing, areas where there are very strong network effect moats. It’s not chat or social media or collaborative office software. An example business need: Take all my documents and create an LLM acting as an internal knowledgebase. Likely eventual Microsoft/Google solution: Press this button to take all your documents from your Office 365/GSuite account into our LLM. The LLM provides answers and links to the original document. We have automatic retraining, but you can remove/add data and retrain with a few more clicks. We have set up authentication and filtering so that unauthorized users can't get at your data. Likely eventual OSS 'solution': Find your API key, download all your documents, and train them manually on the NVidia GPU cards you bought. Setting up a virtual python environment with CUDA is easy-peasy! Now, host the documents on your curlftpfs host so that our LLM could link to them.... (I could continue but this is too depressing). I’m not saying there won't be small players, but the Google Research spin of 'no point in investing anything, Open Source will eat all!' was silly in the extreme. There'll be other products, and a smart enough OpenAI has good chances to create its own moats.

by api 3y ago

yyyk 3y ago

>This stuff is also not about communication or sharing, areas where there are very strong network effect moats. It’s not chat or social media or collaborative office software. An example business need: Take all my documents and create an LLM acting as an internal knowledgebase. Likely eventual Microsoft/Google solution: Press this button to take all your documents from your Office 365/GSuite account into our LLM. The LLM provides answers and links to the original document. We have automatic retraining, but you can remove/add data and retrain with a few more clicks. We have set up authentication and filtering so that unauthorized users can't get at your data. Likely eventual OSS 'solution': Find your API key, download all your documents, and train them manually on the NVidia GPU cards you bought. Setting up a virtual python environment with CUDA is easy-peasy! Now, host the documents on your curlftpfs host so that our LLM could link to them.... (I could continue but this is too depressing). I’m not saying there won't be small players, but the Google Research spin of 'no point in investing anything, Open Source will eat all!' was silly in the extreme. There'll be other products, and a smart enough OpenAI has good chances to create its own moats.