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> Congratulations, you just wrote a code completion AI! > In fact, this is pretty much how we started out with Cody autocomplete back in March! Am I wrong in

> Congratulations, you just wrote a code completion AI! > In fact, this is pretty much how we started out with Cody autocomplete back in March! Am I wrong in thinking that there's only like 3(?) actual AI companies and everything else is just some frontend to ChatGPT/LLama/Claude? Is this sustainable? I guess the car industry is full of rebadged models with the same engines and chassis. It's just wild that we keep hearing about the AI boom as though there's a vibrant competitive ecosystem and not just Nvidia, a couple of software partners and then a sea of whiteboxers.

airstrike 3y ago
you've got to differentiate between training, inference and hardware. they all benefit from the "AI boom" but at different levels and have varying levels of substitutability (Google tells me that's a real word)
lozenge 3y ago
I mean... the article goes on to explain all their value add... which of course can be replicated, but it's not as if you can just grab an API key and do the same.
- tayo42 3y ago
  Which part do you think you couldn't do on your own with your own api key?
  - ec109685 3y ago
    They’ve been thinking about the problem continuously for the past year, can run experiments across their user base and thus have a lot more context and insight than someone whipping up an implementation.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      well they wrote a whole blog about how they do it... and im sure this isn't the only one on how to approach this. they also only have a 30% acceptance rate, which is only 10% over their initial attempt with just a prompt.
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  But OpenAI could make this themselves in a few weeks, right? If they happen to decide to, then this company is done. That's what I don't get about all these AI startups. The core value of their business is an API call they don't own. It's like people who were selling ______ apps on iPhone when Apple added their own built-in _____ features to iOS, except the entire industry is like that.
  - skybrian 3y ago
    Well sure, a company with ample funding could in theory do anything. It seems sort of like asking why Google didn't beat GitHub on code hosting. They did try, but their focus was elsewhere, so they gave it up. [1] And OpenAI doesn't seem to be doing developer tools at all? GitHub and Microsoft are more likely candidates. GitHub Copilot is a competing product that could be improved if they chose to do so. [1] https://code.google.com/archive/ https://code.google.com/archive/
    - ForHackernews 3y ago
      I'm not really saying that small companies should never compete with big companies. I'm saying that a small company whose biggest competitor is also their key supplier is, if not doomed, at least operating on borrowed time. If my value proposition is reselling AWS hosting with an easy-to-use dashboard, I better pray to god Amazon never makes AWS simpler.
      - ado__dev 3y ago
        I feel like that can be said about any SaaS app. The reality is, mega-corps move very slowly and often can't deliver the same user experience as a start up. If everyone had the approach of "well I shouldn't make this app because if Google wanted to, they could do it in a few weeks" we wouldn't have 90% of the startups we see today.
      - fragmede 3y ago
        Aren't we all operating on borrowed time though? Even if some company exists for 3 years and is able to founders a small acquihire exit, what's wrong with borrowing some time from AWS/OpenAI? We can't all come up with PageRank and patent it and form a company around it.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
freecodyx 3y ago
it make sense, in order to come up with a base model, you will need a lot of quality training data, tons of compute. the role of an AI startup is to come up with ideas, thus useful products. Most of existing products pre-AI, are also front ends to existing operations systems and exiting databases, because creating the whole stack does not make sense. At least we have state of the art open models that we can use freely
Metricon 3y ago
For those who might not be aware of this, there is also an open source project on GitHub called "Twinny" which is an offline Visual Studio Code plugin equivalent to Copilot: https://github.com/rjmacarthy/twinny https://github.com/rjmacarthy/twinny It can be used with a number of local model services. Currently for my setup on a NVIDIA 4090, I'm running both the base and instruct model for deepseek-coder 6.7b using 5_K_M Quantization GGUF files (for performance) through llama.cpp "server" where the base model is for completions and the instruct model for chat interactions. llama.cpp: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/ https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/ deepseek-coder 6.7b base GGUF files: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-base-GGUF https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-base-GGU... deepseek-coder 6.7b instruct GGUF files: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct-GGUF https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct...
Art9681 3y ago
Now think about the amount of products built and scaled worldwide by this audience on top of the few cloud compute providers out there.
hackerlight 3y ago
Your question can be reformulated as "will the application layer's lunch be eaten by better foundation models?"
- ForHackernews 3y ago
  Alternatively: Will my drop-shipping business be killed by AliExpress?

airstrike 3y ago

you've got to differentiate between training, inference and hardware. they all benefit from the "AI boom" but at different levels and have varying levels of substitutability (Google tells me that's a real word)

lozenge 3y ago

I mean... the article goes on to explain all their value add... which of course can be replicated, but it's not as if you can just grab an API key and do the same.

tayo42 3y ago
Which part do you think you couldn't do on your own with your own api key?
- ec109685 3y ago
  They’ve been thinking about the problem continuously for the past year, can run experiments across their user base and thus have a lot more context and insight than someone whipping up an implementation.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    well they wrote a whole blog about how they do it... and im sure this isn't the only one on how to approach this. they also only have a 30% acceptance rate, which is only 10% over their initial attempt with just a prompt.
ForHackernews 3y ago
But OpenAI could make this themselves in a few weeks, right? If they happen to decide to, then this company is done. That's what I don't get about all these AI startups. The core value of their business is an API call they don't own. It's like people who were selling ______ apps on iPhone when Apple added their own built-in _____ features to iOS, except the entire industry is like that.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Well sure, a company with ample funding could in theory do anything. It seems sort of like asking why Google didn't beat GitHub on code hosting. They did try, but their focus was elsewhere, so they gave it up. [1] And OpenAI doesn't seem to be doing developer tools at all? GitHub and Microsoft are more likely candidates. GitHub Copilot is a competing product that could be improved if they chose to do so. [1] https://code.google.com/archive/ https://code.google.com/archive/
  - ForHackernews 3y ago
    I'm not really saying that small companies should never compete with big companies. I'm saying that a small company whose biggest competitor is also their key supplier is, if not doomed, at least operating on borrowed time. If my value proposition is reselling AWS hosting with an easy-to-use dashboard, I better pray to god Amazon never makes AWS simpler.
    - ado__dev 3y ago
      I feel like that can be said about any SaaS app. The reality is, mega-corps move very slowly and often can't deliver the same user experience as a start up. If everyone had the approach of "well I shouldn't make this app because if Google wanted to, they could do it in a few weeks" we wouldn't have 90% of the startups we see today.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Aren't we all operating on borrowed time though? Even if some company exists for 3 years and is able to founders a small acquihire exit, what's wrong with borrowing some time from AWS/OpenAI? We can't all come up with PageRank and patent it and form a company around it.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

freecodyx 3y ago

it make sense, in order to come up with a base model, you will need a lot of quality training data, tons of compute. the role of an AI startup is to come up with ideas, thus useful products. Most of existing products pre-AI, are also front ends to existing operations systems and exiting databases, because creating the whole stack does not make sense. At least we have state of the art open models that we can use freely

Metricon 3y ago

For those who might not be aware of this, there is also an open source project on GitHub called "Twinny" which is an offline Visual Studio Code plugin equivalent to Copilot: https://github.com/rjmacarthy/twinny https://github.com/rjmacarthy/twinny It can be used with a number of local model services. Currently for my setup on a NVIDIA 4090, I'm running both the base and instruct model for deepseek-coder 6.7b using 5_K_M Quantization GGUF files (for performance) through llama.cpp "server" where the base model is for completions and the instruct model for chat interactions. llama.cpp: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/ https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/ deepseek-coder 6.7b base GGUF files: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-base-GGUF https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-base-GGU... deepseek-coder 6.7b instruct GGUF files: https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct-GGUF https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/deepseek-coder-6.7B-instruct...

Art9681 3y ago

Now think about the amount of products built and scaled worldwide by this audience on top of the few cloud compute providers out there.

hackerlight 3y ago

Your question can be reformulated as "will the application layer's lunch be eaten by better foundation models?"

ForHackernews 3y ago
Alternatively: Will my drop-shipping business be killed by AliExpress?