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OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete? This is so, so, so much better t

• aantix 3y ago
  That's an interesting take - podcasts have become a replacement for companionship and conversation.
  • testfrequency 3y ago
    It’s also more fuel for brain rot and toxic personalities to spread. Most podcasters are narcissists
  • zamfi 3y ago
    Same with TV decades years ago, and radio before that. Just a different generation.
  • ggregoire 3y ago
    That's what Twitch has become too. The most popular Twitch streamers do nothing other than watching YouTube videos and providing a fake relationship to their 50,000 live viewers.
  • throw4847285 3y ago
    I don't buy that. People form fan communities around these podcasts where they talk with real people about how much they love listening to minor internet celebrities talk about nothing. Why would they do that if the podcasts served that purpose already? I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet has created an increased demand for it. People need every moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or images. If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the "social animal" instinct until we're numb. I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems are created for each individual filled with the content they want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can argue with them about it. Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick.
    • throw4847285 3y ago
      I may be having a hypomanic episode, but I've been thinking about it more, and it seems like the entire Internet Age has been an attempt to more precisely synthesize the substance which sates human social needs artificially, and that when they perfect it, it's all over.
      • awfulneutral 3y ago
        I've been thinking along those lines too, but more from the angle that our goal is to eliminate any need to rely on other humans for anything. We consider the need for interacting with other humans as a burden and an inconvenience, and we're going to get rid of it, at the cost of all the indirect benefits we got from being forced to do it.
  • nomel 3y ago
    It looks like some people are just learning that introverts exist. Maybe there's something interesting about how more common it is, but none of this is new.
• zer0tonin 3y ago
  $7T is more than the budget of the US federal government, a third of the NASDAQ, or 2,3x AAPL market cap. Sam getting his 7T is not actually possible.
  • justrealist 3y ago
    > or 2300x AAPL market cap It's only 2x the AAPL market cap.
    • zer0tonin 3y ago
      Oops, you're right on that one
    • guywithabowtie 3y ago
      It is a future projected value of a company. You can not realize it. If you start selling stocks, they will drop at a rapid pace. The entire stock market is in a way projection of all future money the stocks will potentially make for a long time. This is not liquid cash that can be injected for any other purpose.
      • justrealist 3y ago
        Cool. However, the OP was incorrect, it's 2x the AAPL market cap.
  • synergy20 3y ago
    AAPL is 2.8T now, how is it 2300x AAPL equals to 7T. 7T is actually possible, but yes it's huge.
    • timdiggerm 3y ago
      In some places, usage of , and . within numbers is revered from what you use
      • Ukv 3y ago
• croes 3y ago
  He never mentioned $7T.
• ren_engineer 3y ago
  seems like a significant chunk of the population may opt in to the Matrix voluntarily. on another note I find it funny they released this right after Google announced their new model. Bad luck for Google or did OpenAI just decide to move up their announcement date to steal their thunder?
  • throwup238 3y ago
    Only those that can afford it. The rest will be forced to live in the real world, like 20th century peasants.
    • ren_engineer 3y ago
      actually the opposite imo, this stuff is the ultimate bread and circus to distract poor people from worsening living conditions. Much cheaper to provide VR goggles with AI model access than housing and healthcare
      • throwup238 3y ago
        As long as sex is the competition, I don't think that's likely. Simulating orgasms will require the Apple iPleasure Maxxx implant and expensive brain surgery & recovery.
        • emmo 3y ago
          I'm not sure sex is always going to be the competition. More and more people are sexless (by choice or not). There are already sex toys that you.. insert yourself in, and then have scripts that sync up movements with VR videos you are watching. Crazy times coming in the next few decades.
  • IncreasePosts 3y ago
    If there is a high fidelity nice simulation of a pleasant world, and the actual real world is a hellscape, what is the problem with that? If you were presented with the fact that whatever your life is is just an illusion, and you are actually a starving slave in North Korea, you would choose to "wake up"?
• swalsh 3y ago
  "How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete?" The play with AI isn't to build the tools to help businesses make money, the play is to directly build the businesses that makes the money. In practice this means, don't focus your business model on building the AI to make text to video happen. Your business model should be an AI studio, if the tech you need doesn't exist, build it.... but if you get beat by someone with more GPU's and more data, cool use the better models. Your business model should focus on using the capability not building it. It's proving quite hard to beat someone with more GPU's, more data, more brain power.
  • loceng 3y ago
    Indeed, they're letting all of these businesses and professionals subscribe to the gold mining equipment - but retaining ownership of it, and they'll be able to undercut those services and cut people off as they please.
    • shostack 3y ago
      This is effectively what Amazon does. Provide the infrastructure to make money selling things, then let merchants de-risk their R&D into what sells best and would be most profitable, then sell their own version of it.
      • marvin 3y ago
        I don't see AWS fast-following the 1.5 million companies that use AWS, not even the 0.1% most successful of them.
  • downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    But then you're stuck playing in the model owner's playground and if you're too successful they can yank the rug from under you and steal your business any time they want.
• dheera 3y ago
  OpenAI's moat is (a) talent (b) access to compute (c) no fear of using whatever data they can get. On the other hand, I think these moats will be destroyed as soon as anyone finds a drastically more efficient (compute- and data-wise) way to train LLMs. Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the intelligence of a human. (Of course it is possible that at that point, OpenAI may then be able to achieve something far superior to human intelligence, but there is a LOT of $$$ out there that only needs human levels of intelligence.)
  • golol 3y ago
    Biology literally took a planet sized genetic algorithm with nanomachines a couple Billion years to get to this point.
  • Eisenstein 3y ago
    > Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the intelligence of a human. Biology suggests that a self-replicating machine can exist by ingesting other machines, turning them into energy and then using that energy to power themselves. Biology suggests that these machines can be so small that we cannot even see them. How close are we to making one of those?
    • PeterisP 3y ago
      I believe that synthetic biology had succeeded already a few years ago in making artificial cells with a fully synthetic genome designed by us with what is sufficient for the cell to eat, grow and replicate, se we already can design and make such 'machines'.
      • Eisenstein 3y ago
        So make a biological AI then. What the parent was saying is that 'biology can do it with organic materials, so we should be able to do it with electronics".
• Alifatisk 3y ago
  We say 7T$ as if it’s nothing, am I the only one shocked by the sum we are talking about? This is close to what BlackRock is managing!
  • ben_w 3y ago
    I'm fairly sure $7T is a speculation bubble, and that's going to pop like all bubbles pop. It's the combined GDP of Japan and Canada. It's too big for an investment. It's not necessarily too big for a valuation, as a sufficiently capable AI is an economic power in its own right: I previously guessed, and even despite its flaws would continue to guess within the domain of software development at least, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement student, and when I was one of those I was earning about £1.7k/month when adjusted for inflation, US$2.1k at current nominal exchange rates. 100 million users at that rate is $2.52e+12/year in economic productivity, and that's with the current chip supply and (my estimate of) the productivity of a year-old model — and everyone knows that this sector is limited by the chips, and that $7T investment story is supposed to be about improving the supply of those chips.
• ericzawo 3y ago
  I hate that this is true.
• cabalamat 3y ago
  > 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc. I think immersive games will also be a big application. Games AI will also benefit from being more strategically intelligent and from being able to negotiate, in a human-like fashion, with human and other AI players. The latter will not only make games better, it will also improve the intelligence of AIs.
  • downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    Yep, since at least World of Warcraft millions of people have already "opted out of life" to live in game worlds. The thing that "The Matrix" style plots get wrong is that the machines don't need to coerce us into their virtual prisons, we will submit willingly.
• minimaxir 3y ago
  > OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete? For posterity since the term has been misused lately, having a very good product isn't a moat in the business sense. There's nothing stopping a competitor from creating a similar product (even if it's difficult), and there's nothing currently stopping OpenAI's users from switching from using Sora to a sufficient competitor if it exists. Sora is more akin to a company like Apple/Google a decade ago using their vast resources to do what a third-party does, but better (e.g. the Sherlocked incident: https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-company-sherlocks-an-app/ https://www.howtogeek.com/297651/what-does-it-mean-when-a-co...).
  • coffeemug 3y ago
    Being (a) first and (b) good enough is a moat. Nothing stopped people from switching from google to bing all these years other than not having any reason to.
    • sdenton4 3y ago
      Google wasn't the first, as all those altavista investors will unhappily attest.
      • ericd 3y ago
        They were the first to "good enough", which is what the GP is talking about.
  • thepasswordis 3y ago
    OpenAIs moat is their massive access to capital and compute. That’s what I mean.
    • minimaxir 3y ago
      Again, that's not a moat. The original "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" leaked memo from Google that memefied the term focuses explicitly on the increasing ease of competitors (especially open-source) entering the ecosystem: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-neither https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
• superjared 3y ago
  > 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc. This is the stuff of Brave New World. It's happening to us in real time.
• tmaly 3y ago
  Even with 7 trillion, he is still going to need a national grid that can supply the power for the compute. There is a lot that has to planned and put in place now to get there. As for people that have opted out of life. We would have a better world if we started encouraging more dreamers/doers like out of the movie Tomorrowland.
• carbine 3y ago
  I agree with much of what you say, but I'm not sure the dystopian conclusion is the main one I'd draw. Improving your ability to connect with and enjoy/learn from people all around the world is one of the main value props of the internet, and tech like this just deepens that potential. Will some people take this to an unhealthy degree that pulls them too far out of reality? Yes. But others will use it to level up their abilities, enrich their lives, create beautiful things, and reduce loneliness.
• zitterbewegung 3y ago
  Looks like they have made large progress in hand generation. They still look like claws a bit but you didn’t have to add a workaround for the query to render correctly and I had to zoom in to verify . When I was watching it the first time I didn’t even notice hand issues.
• advael 3y ago
  I think there are people for whom the fundamental assumption that someone will want "more" of stuff they already like does not hold, and that while those people are a minority, recent developments in the media landscape toward a constant stream of increasingly similarity-curated media has caused them to increasingly disengage from media consumption That said, those people are by definition less relevant to internet consumption metrics
• jijijijij 3y ago
  I predict, this "AI" content generation will eat itself at last. It will outcompete the low-effort "content" industry as is. Then inevitably completely devalue this sort of "product". Because it will never get to 100% of the real thing, the "AI" content craze will ultimately implode. I bet we won't get AGI as a progression of this very technology. The impression of "usefulness" will end when "AI" is starting to drink its own Koolaid on a large scale (copilot lol), and when everyone starts using it as super inefficient business interface. Overfitted mediocre mediocrity, on steroids. Hopefully, this sobriety happens before the economy collapses, as a consequence of all dem bullshit jobs cleansed.
  • visarga 3y ago
    Funny you chose the day of a huge leap in generative video to proclaim generative model limitations.
    • jijijijij 3y ago
      I know, right? Incidentally, even in the same HN thread, too!
  • neilk 3y ago
    I think this analysis is flawed. New technologies are usually bad at substituting for things that already exist. It's 100% true this will not substitute for the existing genre of film and video. New technologies change the economics of how we satisfy our needs. When search engines became good, many pundits confidently predicted Google would never replace librarians or libraries. It didn't. It shifted our relationship to knowledge; instead of having to employ an expert in looking things up, we all had to become experts at sifting through a flood of info. When the cost of producing art-directed and realistic video goes to zero it's hard to predict what's going to happen. Obviously the era of video = veracity is now over. And you can get the equivalent of Martin Scorsese and a million dollar budget to do the video instructions for a hair dryer. Instead of hunting for a gif to express how you feel, captured from an existing TV show or something, you could create a scene on the fly and attach it to a text message. Or maybe you dispense with text messages altogether. Maybe text is only for talking to computers now. My personal prediction is that the value of a degree in art history is going to go way, way up, because they'll be the best prompt engineers. And just like desktop publishing spawned legions of amateur typesetters, it will create lots of lore among amateur video creators.
• macrolime 3y ago
  >100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc. All of these things are against the terms of service and attempting them may result in a ban.
  • resolutebat 3y ago
    There are no terms of service for the open-source clone of this that we'll have in 6 months.
    • raydev 3y ago
      Is there an open-source GPT4 equivalent right now? Doesn't seem like anything has taken off and gotten rave reviews on the level of OpenAI's offering yet.
      • resolutebat 3y ago
        Equivalent, no. Close enough for many uses, sure, and it's getting better all the time.
• treprinum 3y ago
  It's going to take a while to make this realtime as you suggest. The lower the latency, the more $$$ it costs (exponentially).
• patrickwalton 3y ago
  This comment just hit the charts of the black mirror scoreboard
• karmasimida 3y ago
  This is very impressive But VFX isn't that big of a market by itself: Global visual effects (VFX) market size was US$ 10.0 Billion in 2023
• ben_w 3y ago
  > Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and when he does everybody else will be locked out forever. I would be extremely surprised if he could get past the market cap of all current corporations as an investment. That doesn't mean "no, never"[0], but I would be extremely surprised. $7T in one go would be 6.7% of global GDP, and is approximately the combined GDP of Japan and Canada. > These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was playing with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown by "an astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back and look at the images they were creating then, and compare that to this. Indeed, though I will moderate that by analogy: it's been just over 30 years since DOOM was released, and that was followed by a large number of breathless announcements about how each game had "amazing photorealistic graphics that beat everything else" while forgetting that the same people had said the same things about all the other games released since DOOM. Don't get me wrong: these clips are amazing. They may not be perfect, but it took me a few loops to notice the errors. I'm sure there are people with better eyes for details than me, who will spot more errors, spot them sooner, and keep noticing them long after GenAI seems perfect to me. But I also expect that, just as 3D games' journalism spent a long time convinced the products were perfect when they weren't, so too will GenAI journalism spend a long time convinced the products are perfect before they actually are. [0] a sufficiently capable AI is an economic power in its own right. I previously guessed, and even with it's flaws would continue to guess, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement student, and when I was one of those I was earning £1k/month (about £1.7k/month when adjusted for inflation).
  • gwern 3y ago
    Yes, the 'special effects' effect will kick in. Within a year or so, you'll spot this easily, quite aside from the more obvious issues. (That Landrover captioned 'DANDOVER' - is this still using BPEs?!) Aside from visual plausibility, there's also the issue of physics: one of the things you would like to use video models for is understanding real-world physics and cause-and-effect for planning or learning _in silico_. Something may look good but get key physics wrong and be useless for, say, robotics.
• OhioMan2943 3y ago
  it wouldn't be too difficult to make a tiktok like app that created tailored prompts for sora based on the user and tracking data. Question is whether it is profitable Hopefully, the line between the real world and virtual world gets stronger once again.