26 ms·
Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?
by WithinReason 2y ago
Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?
- mhh__ 2y agoIt's possible that it's only one strong personality and some money away but my guess is that OpenAI-rosoft have the best stack for doing inference "seriously" at big, big, scale e.g. moving away from hacky research python code and so on.
- erickj 2y agoIts pretty hard to ignore Google in any discussion on big scale
- mhh__ 2y agoCompletely right. Was basically only thinking about OpenAI versus Anthropic. Oops
- XenophileJKO 2y agoGoogle in their corporate structure, is to cautious to be a serious competitor.
- tim333 2y agoI'm not so sure about that. They have kind of opposite incentives to OpenAI. OpenAI starting without much money had to hype the AGI next year stuff to get billions given to them. Google on the other hand is in such a dominant position with most of the search market, much of the ad market, ownership of Deepmind, huge amounts of data and money and so on probably don't want to be seen as a potential monopoly to be broken up. Also Sergey Brin is back in there working on AI.
- luckydata 2y agoThey seem to have managed to do so just fine :)
- piva00 2y agoNot really sure since this space is so murky due to the rapid changes happening. It's quite hard to keep track of what's in each offering if you aren't deep into the AI news cycle. Now personally, I've left the ChatGPT world (meaning I don't pay for a subscription anymore) and have been using Claude from Anthropic much more often for the same tasks, it's been better than my experience with ChatGPT. I prefer Claude's style, Artifacts, etc. Also been toying with local LLMs for tasks that I know don't require a multi-hundred billion parameters to solve.
- tempusalaria 2y agoI also like 3.5 sonnet as the best model (best ui too) and it’s the one I ask questions to We use Gemini flash in prod. The latency and cost is just unbeatable - our product uses llms for lots of simple tasks so we don’t need a frontier model.
- epolanski 2y agoWhat do you use it for out of curiosity?
- sunnybeetroot 2y agoClaude is great except for the fact the iOS app seems to require a login every week. I’ve never had to log into ChatGPT but Claude requires a constant login and the passwordless login makes it more of a pain!
- juahan 2y agoSounds weird, I have had to login exactly once on my iOS devices.
- Closi 2y agoChatGPT-O1 is quite a bit better at certain complex tasks IMO (e.g. writing a larger bit of code against a non-trivial spec and getting it right). Although there are also some tasks that Claude are better at too.
- usaar333 2y agoTalent? Integrations? Ecosystem? I don't know if this is going to emerge as a monopoly, and likely won't, but for whatever reason, openai and anthropic have been several months ahead of everyone else for quite some time.
- causal 2y agoI think the perception that they're several months ahead of everyone is also a branding achievement: They are ahead on Chat LLMs specifically. Meta, Google, and others crush OpenAI on a variety of other model types, but they also aren't hyping their products up to the same degree. Segment Anything 2 is fantastic- but less mysterious because its open source. NotebookLM is amazing, but nobody is rushing to create benchmarks for it. AlphaFold is never going to be used by consumers like ChatGPT. OpenAI is certainly competitive, but they also work overtime to hype everything they produce as "one step closer to the singularity" in a way that the others don't.
- usaar333 2y agoAnthropic isn't really hyping their product that much. It just is really good.
- wkat4242 2y agoInteresting, is it better than gpt? I can't use the OpenAI app anyway as they demand a logged-in Google account. I do have play services but not logged in. It boggles my mind why they want to insist that you make an account with their total competition in order to use their service but they do.
- llm_trw 2y ago>Meta, Google, and others crush OpenAI on a variety of other model types, but they also aren't hyping their products up to the same degree. They aren't letting anyone external have access to their top end products either. Google invented transformers and kept the field stagnant for 5 years because they were afraid it would eat into their search monopoly.
- srockets 2y agoAn extremely large commit with Azure. AFAIK, none of the other non-hyperscaler competitors have access to that much of a compute.
- ponty_rick 2y agoAnthropic has the same with AWS
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dartos 2y ago> non-hyperscaler competitors Well the hyperscale companies are the ones to worry about.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoPretty sure that Meta and X.ai both do.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoNot sure why this has been voted down - X.ai has a 100K H100 cluster in Memphis, and Meta either has (by now) or is in process of acquiring 350K H100s! Unlike the hyperscalers (i.e. cloud providers), Meta has a use for these themselves for inference to run their business on.
- thelittleone 2y agoOne hypothetical advantage could be secret agreements / cooperation with certain agencies. That may help influence policy in line with OpenAI's preferred strategy on safety, model access etc.
- idunnoman1222 2y agoYes, they already collected all the data. The same data has had walls put up around it
- Implicated 2y agoWhile I recognize this, I have to assume that the other "big players" already have this same data... ie: anyone with a search engine that's been crawling the web for decades. New entries to the race? Not so much, new walls and such.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ugh123 2y agoWhich data? Is that data that Google and/or Meta can't get or doesn't have already?
- jazzyjackson 2y agoWell, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.
- staticautomatic 2y agoThere’s tons of human-created data the AI companies aren’t using yet.
- sangnoir 2y ago> so their conversation logs are their moat Google and Meta aren't exactly lacking in conversation data: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Google Talk, Google Groups, Google Plus, Blogspot comments, Youtube Transcripts, &tc. The breadth and and breadth of data those 2 companies are sitting on that goes back for years is mind boggling.
- 2y ago
- riku_iki 2y agothey researched and developed e2e infra + product with high quality, which MS doesn't have (few other players have it).
- mlnj 2y agoAnd every one of these catchup companies have caught up with a small lag.
- mock-possum 2y agoDoes Kleenex? I’ve heard plenty of people call any chatbot “chat gpt” - it’s becoming a genericized household name.
- aksss 2y agoWhat’s the killer 2-syllable word (google, Kleenex)?? ChatGPT is a mouthful. Even copilot rolls off the tongue easier though doesn’t have the mindshare obviously. Generic gpt would be better but you end up saying gpt-style tool, which is worse.
- sorenjan 2y agoI think it shows really well how OpenAI was caught off guard when Chat GPT got popular and proved to be unexpectedly useful for a lot of people. They just gave it a technical name for what it was, a Generative Pre-trained Transformer model that was fine tuned for chat style interaction. If they had any plans on making a product close to what it is today they would have given it a catchier name. And now they're kind of stuck with it.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI agree but otoh it distinguishes itself as a new product class better than if they had gave it a name like Siri, Alexa, Gemini, Jeeves
- Fuzzwah 2y agoYou're not saying 'gippity' yet?
- dgfitz 2y agoI feel like you should trademark that.
- WorldPeas 2y agothe less savvy around me simply call it "chat" and it's understood by context
- pal9000 2y agoEverytime i ask this myself, OpenAI comes up with something new groundbreaking and other companies play catchup. The last was the Realtime API. What are they doing right? I dont know
- lolinder 2y agoOpenAI is playing catch-up of their own. The last big announcement they had was "we finally built Artifacts". This is what happens when there's vibrant competition in a space. Each company is innovating and each company is trying to catch up to their competitors' innovations. It's easy to limit your view to only the places where OpenAI leads, but that's not the whole picture.
- dgfitz 2y agoUp front: I have always hated Facebook, from a “consumer” perspective. Good on everyone who made money, etc. I dislike the entire entity, to say the least. I can’t shake the thought that meta played an integral role in the open-source nature of the LLM movement. Am I wrong, I can’t help but think I’m missing something.
- JeremyNT 2y ago"There is no moat" etc. Getting to market first is obviously worth something but even if you're bullish on their ability to get products out faster near term, Google's going to be breathing right down their neck. They may have some regulatory advantages too, given that they're (sort of) not a part of a huge vertically integrated tech conglomerate (i.e. they may be able to get away with some stuff that Google could not).
- famouswaffles 2y agoThe ChatGPT site crossed 3B visits last month (For perspective - https://imgur.com/a/hqE7jia https://imgur.com/a/hqE7jia). It has been >2B since May this year and >1.5B since March 2023. The Summer slump of last year ? Completely gone. Gemini and Character AI ? A few hundred million. Claude ? Doesn't even register. And the gap has only been increasing. So, "just" brand recognition ? That feels like saying Google "just" has brand recognition over Bing. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-topped-3-billion-visits-in-september/ https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-top...
- charlieyu1 2y agoYea the figures look great so far. Doesn’t mean we can bet the future on it.
- DanHulton 2y agoI mean it's still not an impassibly strong moat. If it were, we'd all still be on MySpace and Digg.
- qeternity 2y agoAs model performance converges, it becomes the strongest moat. Why go to Claude for a marginally better model when you have the ChatGPT app downloaded and all your chat history there.
- segasaturn 2y agoI actually pre-emptively deleted ChatGPT and my account recently as I suspect that they're going to start aggressively putting ads and user tracking into the site and apps to build revenue. I also bet that if they do go through with putting ads into the app that daily user numbers will drop sharply - one of ChatGPT's biggest draws is its clean, no-nonsense UX. There are plenty of competitors that are as good as o1 so I have lots of choices to jump ship to.
- 2y ago
- julianeon 2y agoNo (broadly defined). But if you believe in OpenAI, you believe that's enough.
- qwertox 2y agoNothing which other companies couldn't catch up with if OpenAI would break down / slow down for a year (i.e. because they lost their privileged access to computing resources). Engineers would quit and start improving the competition. They're still a bit fragile, in my view.
- AlwaysRock 2y agoI used to think it was significantly better than most other players but it feels like everyone else has caught up. Depending on the use case they have been surpassed as well. I use perplexity for a lot of thinks I would have previously used chatgpt for mostly because it gives sources with its responses.
- josh-sematic 2y agoAs others have said I would say first-mover/brand advantage is the big one. Also their o1 model does seem to have some research behind it that hasn't been replicated by others. If you're curious about the latter claim, here's a blog I wrote about it: https://www.airtrain.ai/blog/how-openai-o1-changes-the-llm-training-picture-part-2 https://www.airtrain.ai/blog/how-openai-o1-changes-the-llm-t...