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The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock

The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock things down. I think at this point there are enough people knowledgeable and interested in open LM technology that, if openai begins to degrade in quality, we won’t lose this technology forever. I’ve personally been obsessively reading papers about new models and transformer modifications, and having succeeded in implementing some I think the experience has taught me that this tech is probably where web was in the 90s: easy in concept, expensive and hard to scale due to a few missing easy pieces thatll come later.

viscanti 3y ago
> The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock things down. Do we know that there's zero benefit from the user generated data they're getting now? They know when someone clicks the button to regenerate, and in theory they can have GPT4 review all the responses and classify if they're good or not. I don't know how beneficial that data is, so I'm curious if it's been proven to be completely worthless or not. If it's valuable at all, and openai is using it to continually improve the performance of ChatGPT, then maybe it will be difficult for a competitor to ever get traffic and data to their alternative.
- malwrar 3y ago
  I don’t know about “zero benefit”—certainly their access to customer queries gives them a gods eye view into how people are using their LM implementation and to some degree could probably be used to fine-tune their model—but I doubt it gives them a leg up that couldn’t be matched through the sheer scale of academics and volunteers who contribute to open solutions & research. Maybe we invent a method for directly fine-tuning based on user interactions, or we discover that there’s some shelf where further fine-tuning only confuses the model, or discover some magical architectural modification or dataset that enables high-quality interactions. We’re still at the stage where basic modifications to the model breaks seemingly insurmountable problems. ALiBi for example swaps in a new attention mechanism, literally just a matrix addition operation, and found that it enables inference far past the context limit. I’m ultimately optimistic, their data is valuable but I don’t think it’s insurmountable.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
reddit/twitter/etc(?) data might be vast, but it's very low quality...
- fomine3 3y ago
  Sometimes low quality text is what people need.

viscanti 3y ago

> The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock things down. Do we know that there's zero benefit from the user generated data they're getting now? They know when someone clicks the button to regenerate, and in theory they can have GPT4 review all the responses and classify if they're good or not. I don't know how beneficial that data is, so I'm curious if it's been proven to be completely worthless or not. If it's valuable at all, and openai is using it to continually improve the performance of ChatGPT, then maybe it will be difficult for a competitor to ever get traffic and data to their alternative.

malwrar 3y ago
I don’t know about “zero benefit”—certainly their access to customer queries gives them a gods eye view into how people are using their LM implementation and to some degree could probably be used to fine-tune their model—but I doubt it gives them a leg up that couldn’t be matched through the sheer scale of academics and volunteers who contribute to open solutions & research. Maybe we invent a method for directly fine-tuning based on user interactions, or we discover that there’s some shelf where further fine-tuning only confuses the model, or discover some magical architectural modification or dataset that enables high-quality interactions. We’re still at the stage where basic modifications to the model breaks seemingly insurmountable problems. ALiBi for example swaps in a new attention mechanism, literally just a matrix addition operation, and found that it enables inference far past the context limit. I’m ultimately optimistic, their data is valuable but I don’t think it’s insurmountable.

BlueTemplar 3y ago

reddit/twitter/etc(?) data might be vast, but it's very low quality...

fomine3 3y ago
Sometimes low quality text is what people need.