7 ms·

IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI. Unlike a Google, they don't have anything else of any value. If AGI is not possible, or is

IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI. Unlike a Google, they don't have anything else of any value. If AGI is not possible, or is at least not in reach within the next decade or so, OpenAI will have a product in the form of AI models that have basically zero moat. They will be Netscape in a world where Microsoft is giving away Internet Explorer for free. Meanwhile, Google would be perfectly fine. They can just integrate whatever improvements the actually existing AI models offer into their other products.

benterix 10mo ago
> They can just integrate whatever improvements the actually existing AI models offer into their other products. If this is what users actually want.
- ActivePattern 10mo ago
  Yes, as is implied by the word "improvements"
  - benterix 10mo ago
    Which, as practice shows, tend to be understood differently by customers and PMs.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
huflungdung 10mo ago
[dead]
trenning 10mo ago
This is how I look at Meta as well. Despite how much it is hated on here fb/ig/whatsapp aren’t dying. AI not getting much better from here is probably in their best interest even. It’s just good enough to create the slop their users love to post and engage with. The tools for advertisers are pretty good and just need better products around current models. And without new training costs “everyone” says inference is profitable now, so they can keep all the slopgen tools around for users after the bubble. Right now the media is riding the wave of TPUs they for some reason didn’t know existed last week. But Google and meta have the most to gain from AI not having any more massive leaps towards agi.
treis 10mo ago
They're both all in on being a starting point to the Internet. Painting with a broad brush that was Facebook or Google Search. Now it's Facebook, Google Search, and ChatGPT. There is absolutely a moat. OpenAI is going to have a staggering amount of data on its users. People tell ChatGPT everything and it probably won't be limited to what people directly tell ChatGPT. I think the future is something like how everyone built their website with Google Analytics. Everyone will use OpenAI because they will have a ton of context on their users that will make your chatbot better. It's a self perpetuating cycle because OpenAI will have the users to refine their product against.
- mnky9800n 10mo ago
  yeah but your argument is true for every llm provider. so i don't see how it's a moat since everyone who can raise money to offer an llm can do the same thing. and google and microsoft doesn't need to find llm revenue it can always offer it at a loss if it chooses unless it's other revenue streams suddenly evaporate. and tbh i kind of doubt personalization is as deep of a moat as you think it is.
  - treis 10mo ago
    Everyone could raise and build a search engine or social network. Many did and none of them dethroned Google or Facebook.
    - WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
      Google can offer their services for free for a lot longer than OpenAI can, and already does to students. DeepSeek offers their competitor product to ChatGPT for free to everyone already.
      - treis 10mo ago
        I don't think that's accurate. They're within the range of profitability on inference today and that's before theyve started selling ads.
lenerdenator 10mo ago
> IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI I think this needs to be said again. Also, not only do we not know if AGI is possible, but generally speaking, it doesn't bring much value if it is. At that point we're talking about up-ending 10,000 years of human society and economics, assuming that the AGI doesn't decide humans are too dangerous to keep around and have the ability to wipe us out. If I'm a worker or business owner, I don't need AGI. I need something that gets x task done with a y increase in efficiency. Most models today can do that provided the right training for the person using the model. The SV obsession with AGI is more of a self-important Frankenstein-meets-Pascal's Wager proposition than it is a value proposition. It needs to end.
- efdee 10mo ago
  Why would AGI not be possible? It might be hard, it might be difficult, but it is definitely possible. Us humans are the evidence for that.
  - gampleman 10mo ago
    That’s rather presupposing materialism (in the philosophy of mind sense) is correct. That seems to be the consensus theory, but it’s not be shown ‘definitely’ true.
  - torginus 10mo ago
    Because human brains are giant three-dimensional processors containing billions of neurons (each with computationally complex behaviors), each one performing computations >3 orders of magnitude more efficiently than transistors do, to train an intelligence with trillions of connections in real time, while being attached to incredibly sophisticated sensors and manipulators. And despite all that, humans are still just made of dirt. Even if we can get silicon to do some of these tricks, that'd require multiple breakthroughs, and it wouldn't be cost-competitive with humans for quite a while. I would even think it's possible that building brain-equivalent structures that consume the same power, and can do all the stuff for the same amount of resources, is a so far out science fiction proposition, that we can't even give a prediction as to when it will happen, and for practical purposes, biological intelligences will have an insurmountable advantage for even the furthest foreseeable future once you consider the economics of humans vs machines.
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> they are all-in on AGI What are you basing this on? None of their investor-oriented marketing says this.
- perlgeek 10mo ago
  https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/ > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. Note that it doesn't say: "Our mission is to maximize shareholder value, and we develop AI systems to do that".
  - bradleybuda 10mo ago
    In fairness, no company’s mission statement says “maximize shareholder value” because it doesn’t need to be said - it’s implicit. But I agree that AGI is at the forefront of OpenAI’s mission in a way it isn’t for Google - the nonprofit roots are not gone.
    - bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
      I’m not nitpicking as such, I’m just providing a counterexample because it is rather rare for a company to spell it out: > In order to achieve our mission, we will conduct our business with the following Code of Ethics in mind: > Obey the law. > Take care of our members. > Take care of our employees. > Respect our suppliers. > If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will achieve our ultimate goal, which is to reward our shareholders. https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/829/loc/en_US https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a...
      - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        > just providing a counterexample because it is rather rare for a company to spell it out To be fair, that's a mission statement paired with a succinct code of ethics.
jug 10mo ago
I've also thought of this and what's more, Google's platform provides them with training from YouTube, optimal backend access to the Google Search index for grounding from an engine they've honed for decades, training from their smartphones, smart home devices and TV's, Google Cloud... And as you say, also the reverse; empowering their services from said AI, too. They can also run AI as a loss leader like with Antigravity. Meanwhile, OpenAI looks like they're fumbling with that immediately controversial statement about allowing NSFW after adult verification, and that strange AI social network which mostly led to Sora memes outside of it. I think they're going to need to do better. As for coding tools, Anthropic is an ever stronger contender there, if they weren't pressured from Google already.
tarsinge 10mo ago
Not only this, but there is a compounded bet that it’ll be OpenAI that cracks AGI and not another lab, particularly Google from which LLMs come in the first place. What makes OpenAI researchers so special at this point?
- hdjrudni 10mo ago
  What's more -- how long can they keep the lid on AGI? If anyone actually cracks it... surely competitors are only a couple months behind. At least that seems to be the case with every new model thus far.
cyanydeez 10mo ago
Also, they'll have garbage because the curve is sinusoidal and not anything else. Regardless of the moat, the models won't be powerful enough to do a significant amount of work.
sholain 10mo ago
"don't have anything else of any value. " ? OpenAI is still de facto the market leader in terms of selling tokens. "zero moat" - it's a big enough moat that only maybe four companies in the world have that level of capability, they have the strongest global brand awareness and direct user base, they have some tooling and integrations which are relatively unique etc.. 'Cloud' is a bigger business than AI at least today, and what is 'AWS moat'? When AWS started out, they had 0 reach into Enterprise while Google and AWS had infinity capital and integration with business and they still lost. There's a lot of talk of this tech as though it's a commodity, it really isn't. The evidence is in the context of the article aka this is an extraordinary expensive market to compete in. Their lack of deep pockets may be the problem, less so than everything else. This should be an existential concern for AI market as a whole, much like Oil companies before highway project buildout as the only entities able to afford to build toll roads. Did we want Exxon owning all of the Highways 'because free market'? Even more than Chips, the costs are energy and other issues, for which Chinese government has a national strategy which is absolutely already impacting the AI market. If they're able to build out 10x data centres at offer 1/10th the price at least for all the non-Frontier LLM, and some right at the Frontier, well, that would be bad in the geopolitical sense.
- podgietaru 10mo ago
  I mean, on your Cloud point I think AWS' moat might arguably be a set of deep integrations between services, and friendly API's that allow developers to quickly integrate and iterate. If AWS' was still just EC2, and S3 then I would argue they had very little moat indeed. Now, when it comes to Generative AI models, we will need to see where the dust settles. But open-weight alternatives have shown that you can get a decent level of performance on consumer grade hardware. Training AI is absolutely a task that needs deep pockets, and heavy scale. If we settle into a world where improvements are iterative, the tooling is largely interoperable... Then OpenAI are going to have to start finding ways of making money that are not providing API access to a model. They will have to build a moat. And that moat may well be a deep set of integrations, and an ecosystem that makes moving away hard, as it arguably is with the cloud.
  - 10mo ago
nradov 10mo ago
The moat for any frontier LLM developer will be access to proprietary training data. OpenAI is spending some of their cash to license exclusive rights to third party data, and also hiring human experts in certain fields just to create more internal training data. Of course their competitors are also doing the same. We may end up in a situation where each LLM ends up superior in some domains and inferior in others depending on access to high quality training data.
- throwaway1389z 10mo ago
  "Needs cash" is not a moat.

benterix 10mo ago

> They can just integrate whatever improvements the actually existing AI models offer into their other products. If this is what users actually want.

ActivePattern 10mo ago
Yes, as is implied by the word "improvements"
- benterix 10mo ago
  Which, as practice shows, tend to be understood differently by customers and PMs.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

huflungdung 10mo ago

[dead]

trenning 10mo ago

This is how I look at Meta as well. Despite how much it is hated on here fb/ig/whatsapp aren’t dying. AI not getting much better from here is probably in their best interest even. It’s just good enough to create the slop their users love to post and engage with. The tools for advertisers are pretty good and just need better products around current models. And without new training costs “everyone” says inference is profitable now, so they can keep all the slopgen tools around for users after the bubble. Right now the media is riding the wave of TPUs they for some reason didn’t know existed last week. But Google and meta have the most to gain from AI not having any more massive leaps towards agi.

treis 10mo ago

They're both all in on being a starting point to the Internet. Painting with a broad brush that was Facebook or Google Search. Now it's Facebook, Google Search, and ChatGPT. There is absolutely a moat. OpenAI is going to have a staggering amount of data on its users. People tell ChatGPT everything and it probably won't be limited to what people directly tell ChatGPT. I think the future is something like how everyone built their website with Google Analytics. Everyone will use OpenAI because they will have a ton of context on their users that will make your chatbot better. It's a self perpetuating cycle because OpenAI will have the users to refine their product against.

mnky9800n 10mo ago
yeah but your argument is true for every llm provider. so i don't see how it's a moat since everyone who can raise money to offer an llm can do the same thing. and google and microsoft doesn't need to find llm revenue it can always offer it at a loss if it chooses unless it's other revenue streams suddenly evaporate. and tbh i kind of doubt personalization is as deep of a moat as you think it is.
- treis 10mo ago
  Everyone could raise and build a search engine or social network. Many did and none of them dethroned Google or Facebook.
  - WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
    Google can offer their services for free for a lot longer than OpenAI can, and already does to students. DeepSeek offers their competitor product to ChatGPT for free to everyone already.
    - treis 10mo ago
      I don't think that's accurate. They're within the range of profitability on inference today and that's before theyve started selling ads.

lenerdenator 10mo ago

> IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI I think this needs to be said again. Also, not only do we not know if AGI is possible, but generally speaking, it doesn't bring much value if it is. At that point we're talking about up-ending 10,000 years of human society and economics, assuming that the AGI doesn't decide humans are too dangerous to keep around and have the ability to wipe us out. If I'm a worker or business owner, I don't need AGI. I need something that gets x task done with a y increase in efficiency. Most models today can do that provided the right training for the person using the model. The SV obsession with AGI is more of a self-important Frankenstein-meets-Pascal's Wager proposition than it is a value proposition. It needs to end.

efdee 10mo ago
Why would AGI not be possible? It might be hard, it might be difficult, but it is definitely possible. Us humans are the evidence for that.
- gampleman 10mo ago
  That’s rather presupposing materialism (in the philosophy of mind sense) is correct. That seems to be the consensus theory, but it’s not be shown ‘definitely’ true.
- torginus 10mo ago
  Because human brains are giant three-dimensional processors containing billions of neurons (each with computationally complex behaviors), each one performing computations >3 orders of magnitude more efficiently than transistors do, to train an intelligence with trillions of connections in real time, while being attached to incredibly sophisticated sensors and manipulators. And despite all that, humans are still just made of dirt. Even if we can get silicon to do some of these tricks, that'd require multiple breakthroughs, and it wouldn't be cost-competitive with humans for quite a while. I would even think it's possible that building brain-equivalent structures that consume the same power, and can do all the stuff for the same amount of resources, is a so far out science fiction proposition, that we can't even give a prediction as to when it will happen, and for practical purposes, biological intelligences will have an insurmountable advantage for even the furthest foreseeable future once you consider the economics of humans vs machines.

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

> they are all-in on AGI What are you basing this on? None of their investor-oriented marketing says this.

perlgeek 10mo ago
https://openai.com/charter/ https://openai.com/charter/ > OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome. Note that it doesn't say: "Our mission is to maximize shareholder value, and we develop AI systems to do that".
- bradleybuda 10mo ago
  In fairness, no company’s mission statement says “maximize shareholder value” because it doesn’t need to be said - it’s implicit. But I agree that AGI is at the forefront of OpenAI’s mission in a way it isn’t for Google - the nonprofit roots are not gone.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
    I’m not nitpicking as such, I’m just providing a counterexample because it is rather rare for a company to spell it out: > In order to achieve our mission, we will conduct our business with the following Code of Ethics in mind: > Obey the law. > Take care of our members. > Take care of our employees. > Respect our suppliers. > If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will achieve our ultimate goal, which is to reward our shareholders. https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/829/loc/en_US https://customerservice.costco.com/app/answers/answer_view/a...
    - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
      > just providing a counterexample because it is rather rare for a company to spell it out To be fair, that's a mission statement paired with a succinct code of ethics.

jug 10mo ago

I've also thought of this and what's more, Google's platform provides them with training from YouTube, optimal backend access to the Google Search index for grounding from an engine they've honed for decades, training from their smartphones, smart home devices and TV's, Google Cloud... And as you say, also the reverse; empowering their services from said AI, too. They can also run AI as a loss leader like with Antigravity. Meanwhile, OpenAI looks like they're fumbling with that immediately controversial statement about allowing NSFW after adult verification, and that strange AI social network which mostly led to Sora memes outside of it. I think they're going to need to do better. As for coding tools, Anthropic is an ever stronger contender there, if they weren't pressured from Google already.

tarsinge 10mo ago

Not only this, but there is a compounded bet that it’ll be OpenAI that cracks AGI and not another lab, particularly Google from which LLMs come in the first place. What makes OpenAI researchers so special at this point?

hdjrudni 10mo ago
What's more -- how long can they keep the lid on AGI? If anyone actually cracks it... surely competitors are only a couple months behind. At least that seems to be the case with every new model thus far.

cyanydeez 10mo ago

Also, they'll have garbage because the curve is sinusoidal and not anything else. Regardless of the moat, the models won't be powerful enough to do a significant amount of work.

sholain 10mo ago

"don't have anything else of any value. " ? OpenAI is still de facto the market leader in terms of selling tokens. "zero moat" - it's a big enough moat that only maybe four companies in the world have that level of capability, they have the strongest global brand awareness and direct user base, they have some tooling and integrations which are relatively unique etc.. 'Cloud' is a bigger business than AI at least today, and what is 'AWS moat'? When AWS started out, they had 0 reach into Enterprise while Google and AWS had infinity capital and integration with business and they still lost. There's a lot of talk of this tech as though it's a commodity, it really isn't. The evidence is in the context of the article aka this is an extraordinary expensive market to compete in. Their lack of deep pockets may be the problem, less so than everything else. This should be an existential concern for AI market as a whole, much like Oil companies before highway project buildout as the only entities able to afford to build toll roads. Did we want Exxon owning all of the Highways 'because free market'? Even more than Chips, the costs are energy and other issues, for which Chinese government has a national strategy which is absolutely already impacting the AI market. If they're able to build out 10x data centres at offer 1/10th the price at least for all the non-Frontier LLM, and some right at the Frontier, well, that would be bad in the geopolitical sense.

podgietaru 10mo ago
I mean, on your Cloud point I think AWS' moat might arguably be a set of deep integrations between services, and friendly API's that allow developers to quickly integrate and iterate. If AWS' was still just EC2, and S3 then I would argue they had very little moat indeed. Now, when it comes to Generative AI models, we will need to see where the dust settles. But open-weight alternatives have shown that you can get a decent level of performance on consumer grade hardware. Training AI is absolutely a task that needs deep pockets, and heavy scale. If we settle into a world where improvements are iterative, the tooling is largely interoperable... Then OpenAI are going to have to start finding ways of making money that are not providing API access to a model. They will have to build a moat. And that moat may well be a deep set of integrations, and an ecosystem that makes moving away hard, as it arguably is with the cloud.
- 10mo ago

nradov 10mo ago

The moat for any frontier LLM developer will be access to proprietary training data. OpenAI is spending some of their cash to license exclusive rights to third party data, and also hiring human experts in certain fields just to create more internal training data. Of course their competitors are also doing the same. We may end up in a situation where each LLM ends up superior in some domains and inferior in others depending on access to high quality training data.

throwaway1389z 10mo ago
"Needs cash" is not a moat.