> OpenAI is outpacing its competitors largely due to the vast amount of data it can gather from free ChatGPT users Every human has private experience, or tacit

> OpenAI is outpacing its competitors largely due to the vast amount of data it can gather from free ChatGPT users Every human has private experience, or tacit experience they never expressed in writing. It is our lived experience that was never recorded, and we carry around in our heads. But assisting 200M users can elicit a lot of that tacit knowledge from them. It is like the LLM is crawling its users for "dark knowledge". LLMs in the chat room can also get feedback from the world. As they suggest ideas and humans try them out, then come back with the outcomes to iterate, the LLM collects valuable signals - did the idea work out or not? I think OpenAI serves 1B tasks per month and 2T interactive tokens. In a year they surpass the size of the original GPT-4 training set. On the other hand, by putting trillions of tokens into human brains they create an outsized impact in the physical world as well, which percolates back months later in the next training set. A huge feedback loop, and experience flywheel. I think the best assistant LLMs will create a network effect that will bring even more users to them, making them even smarter. That explains why they allow free access to their best model. They're playing a long game focused on data acquisition and model improvement.