5 ms·

> I guess it has a cost, though? I presume OpenAI didn’t like this move. If that’s the case, what might be the consequences? Until OpenAI releases GPT 5 and it

> I guess it has a cost, though? I presume OpenAI didn’t like this move. If that’s the case, what might be the consequences? Until OpenAI releases GPT 5 and it blows everyone away, OpenAI's leverage is constantly decreasing as the gap between their best model and everyone else's best model decreases. There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance. Maybe someone should as ChatGPT what OpenAI should do to maintain long-term leadership in this industry?

asynchronous 3y ago
They also have brand recognition, for what it’s worth. Every non-engineer in the world practically thinks AI == ChatGPT.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Meh, I don't think it's worth much. In a few years that'll be like claiming that so-and-so had name brand recognition for transistors. Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors.
  - donny2018 3y ago
    It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most people don’t know that TSMC exists, or what Microsoft does beyond Windows and Xbox (which are a small fraction of its business).
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      Correct, I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said it's not clear that it's a good thing (i.e. an asset)
  - bhouston 3y ago
    Unless your market is direct to end user, end user brand name recognition doesn't matter. In the case of AI, at least so far, the primarily income won't be from end-users directly, but rather via enterprise integrations into existing tools that already have end user market share (e.g. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, VS Code, Notion, etc.)
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors. They might, in an upside-down world where the Shockley Semiconductor board tried to fire Shockley, and where the Traitorous Eight not only didn't bail out but took his side.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Brands can change quickly, but they do matter in the short term. I've witnessed customer support teams use Firefox to say they only supported Internet Explorer and government ministers who thought it was "good" that IE was the "only" web browser, and weirdly a phone company whose customer support person thought their SIM cards worked better on Android than iPhone and that their web chat wouldn't work with a Mac even though they were talking to me on a Mac at the time. And when I was a kid, it seemed like all the teachers thought it would be a waste of time to learn MacOS because "Apple would be bankrupt soon". (Given how much all the app UIs changed, right decision for the wrong reason).
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      All of these examples are end-products. "AI" itself will not be. The winner in AI will be whoever permeates other products/brands most successfully, and end-user brand familiarity doesn't matter much for that. Familiarity among engineering and product leaders is what matters.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Indeed, I'm not disagreeing on that, merely opining that "ChatGPT" as a name could well be relevant for a bit.
      - mitjam 3y ago
        Maybe, but maybe AI will become front and center of consumer and productivity IT products and their premier brand ambassadors will be anthropomorphized AI agents. Hello Clippy, this time for real.
- bhouston 3y ago
  Sure that helps with the consumer market, but most people will use AI integrated into other products and not directly. Those integrated AI solutions will usually be done via enterprise deals where brand name is not quite as important. It will be done by people who care about cost, reliability and ease of use. Think of nginx's dominance in web servers even though it has no name recognition among the general population. Or Stripe's payment system.
- vinay427 3y ago
  Yes, however it's increasingly likely that the GPT in ChatGPT will not be limited to OpenAI (in the US), so I'm not sure how much ChatGPT will be worth with countless other platforms containing GPT in their names. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-openai/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-opena...
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  The thing is that there is almost no lock in in the models. So brand recognition doesn't help much as people look into the benchmarks and price sometime in the future, if not when just starting out.
behnamoh 3y ago
> There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance. Hard disagree. OpenAI's function calling is something no other commercial model provides, not even Gemini and Mistral Large.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  The mixtral large marketing at the top of hn right now claims json mode and native function calling. I haven't tried it, but that's what they say.
- riquito 3y ago
  Is it different from https://docs.mistral.ai/guides/function-calling/ https://docs.mistral.ai/guides/function-calling/ ?
jorvi 3y ago
> There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance. Compute? At least in the short term, it seems like the biggest wallets are going to win by default.
robrenaud 3y ago
If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers. Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he can. Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out. Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to original content creators, approximately solve the content ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the rev share in proportion to their data importance to the model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions against LLM firms. Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data from poisoned models. With the content creators united behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data.
- johngossman 3y ago
  > Stop selling GPUs. I'm not sure Wall St. would reward that plan
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Yeah, he seems to have left out the critical middle step ("Gather investors to take $2T company private.")
  - smegger001 3y ago
    don't stop just raise the margin slightly and limit the number available of the higher end chip using the proceeds to self fund building their own datacneter do runs of cards for themselves with higher core counts and clock speed that they dont release to others.
- Ringz 3y ago
  Sounds like someone has finally asked ChatGPT for a feasible plan to consolidate the AI landscape.
ben_w 3y ago
Eh, all this talk of "moats" etc. feels weird when just a few years ago it seemed like everyone was complaining they'd rearranged their corporate structure to include a fully-owned profit-making subsidiary to attract investments, and all the loud voices seemed to think a cap of x100 return on investment was so large it was unlikely to be reached. And then OpenAI tripped and fell over a magic money printing factory, and the complaints are now in the set ["it's just a stochastic parrot", "it's so good it's a professional threat to $category", "they've lobotomised it", "they don't have a moat", "they're too expensive"]. As the saying goes, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!"

asynchronous 3y ago

They also have brand recognition, for what it’s worth. Every non-engineer in the world practically thinks AI == ChatGPT.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ethanbond 3y ago
Meh, I don't think it's worth much. In a few years that'll be like claiming that so-and-so had name brand recognition for transistors. Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors.
- donny2018 3y ago
  It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Most people don’t know that TSMC exists, or what Microsoft does beyond Windows and Xbox (which are a small fraction of its business).
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Correct, I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said it's not clear that it's a good thing (i.e. an asset)
- bhouston 3y ago
  Unless your market is direct to end user, end user brand name recognition doesn't matter. In the case of AI, at least so far, the primarily income won't be from end-users directly, but rather via enterprise integrations into existing tools that already have end user market share (e.g. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, VS Code, Notion, etc.)
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors. They might, in an upside-down world where the Shockley Semiconductor board tried to fire Shockley, and where the Traitorous Eight not only didn't bail out but took his side.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Brands can change quickly, but they do matter in the short term. I've witnessed customer support teams use Firefox to say they only supported Internet Explorer and government ministers who thought it was "good" that IE was the "only" web browser, and weirdly a phone company whose customer support person thought their SIM cards worked better on Android than iPhone and that their web chat wouldn't work with a Mac even though they were talking to me on a Mac at the time. And when I was a kid, it seemed like all the teachers thought it would be a waste of time to learn MacOS because "Apple would be bankrupt soon". (Given how much all the app UIs changed, right decision for the wrong reason).
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    All of these examples are end-products. "AI" itself will not be. The winner in AI will be whoever permeates other products/brands most successfully, and end-user brand familiarity doesn't matter much for that. Familiarity among engineering and product leaders is what matters.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Indeed, I'm not disagreeing on that, merely opining that "ChatGPT" as a name could well be relevant for a bit.
    - mitjam 3y ago
      Maybe, but maybe AI will become front and center of consumer and productivity IT products and their premier brand ambassadors will be anthropomorphized AI agents. Hello Clippy, this time for real.
bhouston 3y ago
Sure that helps with the consumer market, but most people will use AI integrated into other products and not directly. Those integrated AI solutions will usually be done via enterprise deals where brand name is not quite as important. It will be done by people who care about cost, reliability and ease of use. Think of nginx's dominance in web servers even though it has no name recognition among the general population. Or Stripe's payment system.
vinay427 3y ago
Yes, however it's increasingly likely that the GPT in ChatGPT will not be limited to OpenAI (in the US), so I'm not sure how much ChatGPT will be worth with countless other platforms containing GPT in their names. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-openai/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-opena...
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
The thing is that there is almost no lock in in the models. So brand recognition doesn't help much as people look into the benchmarks and price sometime in the future, if not when just starting out.

behnamoh 3y ago

> There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance. Hard disagree. OpenAI's function calling is something no other commercial model provides, not even Gemini and Mistral Large.

fzzzy 3y ago
The mixtral large marketing at the top of hn right now claims json mode and native function calling. I haven't tried it, but that's what they say.
riquito 3y ago
Is it different from https://docs.mistral.ai/guides/function-calling/ https://docs.mistral.ai/guides/function-calling/ ?

jorvi 3y ago

> There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance. Compute? At least in the short term, it seems like the biggest wallets are going to win by default.

robrenaud 3y ago

If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers. Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he can. Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out. Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to original content creators, approximately solve the content ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the rev share in proportion to their data importance to the model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions against LLM firms. Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data from poisoned models. With the content creators united behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data.

johngossman 3y ago
> Stop selling GPUs. I'm not sure Wall St. would reward that plan
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Yeah, he seems to have left out the critical middle step ("Gather investors to take $2T company private.")
- smegger001 3y ago
  don't stop just raise the margin slightly and limit the number available of the higher end chip using the proceeds to self fund building their own datacneter do runs of cards for themselves with higher core counts and clock speed that they dont release to others.
Ringz 3y ago
Sounds like someone has finally asked ChatGPT for a feasible plan to consolidate the AI landscape.

ben_w 3y ago

Eh, all this talk of "moats" etc. feels weird when just a few years ago it seemed like everyone was complaining they'd rearranged their corporate structure to include a fully-owned profit-making subsidiary to attract investments, and all the loud voices seemed to think a cap of x100 return on investment was so large it was unlikely to be reached. And then OpenAI tripped and fell over a magic money printing factory, and the complaints are now in the set ["it's just a stochastic parrot", "it's so good it's a professional threat to $category", "they've lobotomised it", "they don't have a moat", "they're too expensive"]. As the saying goes, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!"