4 ms·

I think it's already clear that these are going to be commoditized and the free / open source versions will be good enough to capture enough of the value that t

by aprilthird2021 2y ago

I think it's already clear that these are going to be commoditized and the free / open source versions will be good enough to capture enough of the value that the remaining players will not be Facebook-level monopolies on the space

rendang 2y ago
Apparently it isn't clear to the investors valuing OpenAI at >300B. Possibly they're betting that the ecosystem & integrations around their models will generate a certain amount of lock-in or otherwise make the difference in a close-to-even field
- hmottestad 2y ago
  Funnily enough a lot of the open source world has landed on an API that is basically a copy of OpenAI. So if you develop against OpenAI it’s almost a slot in solution to switch to an open source solution.
  - pzo 2y ago
    and on top of that you have solutions like openrouter.ai where you can route inference easily with a combobox
- riffraff 2y ago
  Investors thought someone renting office space was going to revolutionize the world and valued their company 50B.
  - jeswin 2y ago
    I don't think it's automatically a bad idea. Offices require a lot of support, networking, security, maintenance, certifications etc. There are efficiency gains in scaling. In addition, Wework is useful for companies which hire employees in different cities.
    - snowwrestler 2y ago
      Lots of things are good ideas but investing is about price vs value. Good ideas can be overpriced as easily as bad ideas.
- apples_oranges 2y ago
  Well, now their job is to keep up the illusion until they have cashed out or offloaded the investment to somebody else.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  This reminds me of a comedy sketch where a guy is interviewing for a job at a startup, finally gets to the last round and meets the founder, and he tells him the whole thing is an illusion for investors
- fragmede 2y ago
  the bet is if they can produce ai that can replace a level of generic office worker. a bot that you can add to slack and give tasks to do.
bigbones 2y ago
the IP rights holders have yet to bare their teeth. I don't think the outcome you suggest is clear at all, in fact I think if anything entirely the opposite is the most probable outcome. I've lost count of the number of technology epochs that at the time were either silently or explicitly dependent on ignoring the warez aspects while being blinded by the possibilities, Internet video, music and film all went through this phase. GPTs are just a new medium, and by the end of it royalties will in all likelihood still end up being paid to roughly the same set of folk as before I quite like the idea of a future where the AI job holocaust largely never happened because license costs ate up most of the innovation benefit. It's just the kind of regressive greed that keeps the world ticking along and wouldn't be surprised if we ended up with something very close to this
- beeflet 2y ago
  Good historical comparison, but I doubt it this time because there is plausible deniability that a model wasn't trained on a given piece of data. Also, the pool of public domain data is always increasing, so the AI will eventually win in any case, even if we have to wait 100 years
  - bigbones 2y ago
    As I recall it, there was a time when copyright infringement on YouTube was so prolific that the rightsholders essentially forced creation of the first watermarking system that worked at massive scale. I do wonder if any corners of research are currently studying the attribution problem with the specific lens of licensing as its motivation
    - beeflet 2y ago
      Yeah that was the old Viacom vs Youtube days. Here is a great video if you have half an hour to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2h_KGno9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2h_KGno9w . Pretty funny court case where it turns out viacom was violating their OWN copyright... set a massive precedent. But one thing this reminds me of is the idea of a "trap street", something mapmakers used to do was put in false locations on their maps to prove that other mapmakers were copying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street . I figure you could do something similarly adversarial with AI to pollute the public training data on the internet. IDK like adversarial attacks on image classifiers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOZw1tgD8dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOZw1tgD8dA . With an LLM you could try to make them into a manchurian candidate.
bobxmax 2y ago
The vast majority of people couldn't care less about open source
- jonlucc 2y ago
  If you're paying $200/month for something I can do with open source software and $10/month of compute, why wouldn't I offer you the service for $100/month? And then someone offer it for $50? Not everyone has to know about, understand, or use open source solutions for it to open the field.
  - bobxmax 2y ago
    If you can do a $200/mo service for $10/mo, the closed source will reduce their prices to $15/mo and beat you This is just a weird dichotomy you're introducing. Open source will introduce price pressure as any competition will - that doesn't mean you won't have a monopoly.
    - dauhak 2y ago
      If you have virtually no pricing power and have to drop your $200/mo to $15/mo that's a big deal if your $300bn valuation is implying that not happening, which is what OP's point is about Idk what you mean by saying this doesn't preclude a monopoly - having your pricing power eroded by competition is kinda one of the key features of what a monopolistic market isn't
      - bobxmax 2y ago
        Not at all. Monopolies don't imply an anti-rigid price curve. In fact, monopolies almost never have that. A monopoly means a company has enough leverage to corner and disproportionately own the market. This is entirely possible (and usually the case) even with significant pricing pressure.
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      I think you're both missing a bigger picture. How many of these services can now be replicated in-house by a single developer? Which part of the service actually costs money once that dev deconstructs the process? Feels like I won't be paying for anything that isn't real-time. And that any time delay I can introduce in my process will come with massive savings. Picture hiding the loading of loot info behind a treasure chest opening animation in a game, except that time difference means you can pull all the work in-house. Openrouter.ai seems like a step in the right direction but I'd want to do all their calculations myself as well as factor in local/existing gear in a way they don't.
thefourthchime 2y ago
Exactly. I use GPT4o for nearly everything, and occasionally, I'll need o1. For 95% of what I do, it's already good enough.

rendang 2y ago

Apparently it isn't clear to the investors valuing OpenAI at >300B. Possibly they're betting that the ecosystem & integrations around their models will generate a certain amount of lock-in or otherwise make the difference in a close-to-even field

hmottestad 2y ago
Funnily enough a lot of the open source world has landed on an API that is basically a copy of OpenAI. So if you develop against OpenAI it’s almost a slot in solution to switch to an open source solution.
- pzo 2y ago
  and on top of that you have solutions like openrouter.ai where you can route inference easily with a combobox
riffraff 2y ago
Investors thought someone renting office space was going to revolutionize the world and valued their company 50B.
- jeswin 2y ago
  I don't think it's automatically a bad idea. Offices require a lot of support, networking, security, maintenance, certifications etc. There are efficiency gains in scaling. In addition, Wework is useful for companies which hire employees in different cities.
  - snowwrestler 2y ago
    Lots of things are good ideas but investing is about price vs value. Good ideas can be overpriced as easily as bad ideas.
apples_oranges 2y ago
Well, now their job is to keep up the illusion until they have cashed out or offloaded the investment to somebody else.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
This reminds me of a comedy sketch where a guy is interviewing for a job at a startup, finally gets to the last round and meets the founder, and he tells him the whole thing is an illusion for investors
fragmede 2y ago
the bet is if they can produce ai that can replace a level of generic office worker. a bot that you can add to slack and give tasks to do.

bigbones 2y ago

the IP rights holders have yet to bare their teeth. I don't think the outcome you suggest is clear at all, in fact I think if anything entirely the opposite is the most probable outcome. I've lost count of the number of technology epochs that at the time were either silently or explicitly dependent on ignoring the warez aspects while being blinded by the possibilities, Internet video, music and film all went through this phase. GPTs are just a new medium, and by the end of it royalties will in all likelihood still end up being paid to roughly the same set of folk as before I quite like the idea of a future where the AI job holocaust largely never happened because license costs ate up most of the innovation benefit. It's just the kind of regressive greed that keeps the world ticking along and wouldn't be surprised if we ended up with something very close to this

beeflet 2y ago
Good historical comparison, but I doubt it this time because there is plausible deniability that a model wasn't trained on a given piece of data. Also, the pool of public domain data is always increasing, so the AI will eventually win in any case, even if we have to wait 100 years
- bigbones 2y ago
  As I recall it, there was a time when copyright infringement on YouTube was so prolific that the rightsholders essentially forced creation of the first watermarking system that worked at massive scale. I do wonder if any corners of research are currently studying the attribution problem with the specific lens of licensing as its motivation
  - beeflet 2y ago
    Yeah that was the old Viacom vs Youtube days. Here is a great video if you have half an hour to spare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2h_KGno9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV2h_KGno9w . Pretty funny court case where it turns out viacom was violating their OWN copyright... set a massive precedent. But one thing this reminds me of is the idea of a "trap street", something mapmakers used to do was put in false locations on their maps to prove that other mapmakers were copying them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street . I figure you could do something similarly adversarial with AI to pollute the public training data on the internet. IDK like adversarial attacks on image classifiers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOZw1tgD8dA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOZw1tgD8dA . With an LLM you could try to make them into a manchurian candidate.

bobxmax 2y ago

The vast majority of people couldn't care less about open source

jonlucc 2y ago
If you're paying $200/month for something I can do with open source software and $10/month of compute, why wouldn't I offer you the service for $100/month? And then someone offer it for $50? Not everyone has to know about, understand, or use open source solutions for it to open the field.
- bobxmax 2y ago
  If you can do a $200/mo service for $10/mo, the closed source will reduce their prices to $15/mo and beat you This is just a weird dichotomy you're introducing. Open source will introduce price pressure as any competition will - that doesn't mean you won't have a monopoly.
  - dauhak 2y ago
    If you have virtually no pricing power and have to drop your $200/mo to $15/mo that's a big deal if your $300bn valuation is implying that not happening, which is what OP's point is about Idk what you mean by saying this doesn't preclude a monopoly - having your pricing power eroded by competition is kinda one of the key features of what a monopolistic market isn't
    - bobxmax 2y ago
      Not at all. Monopolies don't imply an anti-rigid price curve. In fact, monopolies almost never have that. A monopoly means a company has enough leverage to corner and disproportionately own the market. This is entirely possible (and usually the case) even with significant pricing pressure.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    I think you're both missing a bigger picture. How many of these services can now be replicated in-house by a single developer? Which part of the service actually costs money once that dev deconstructs the process? Feels like I won't be paying for anything that isn't real-time. And that any time delay I can introduce in my process will come with massive savings. Picture hiding the loading of loot info behind a treasure chest opening animation in a game, except that time difference means you can pull all the work in-house. Openrouter.ai seems like a step in the right direction but I'd want to do all their calculations myself as well as factor in local/existing gear in a way they don't.

thefourthchime 2y ago

Exactly. I use GPT4o for nearly everything, and occasionally, I'll need o1. For 95% of what I do, it's already good enough.