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Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

Based on the speed at which OpenAI is shipping new products and assuming that they use their own technology, I'm starting to get more and more convinced that their technology is a superpower.

Timeline of shipping by them (based on https://twitter.com/E0M/status/1635727471747407872?s=20):

DALL·E - July '22

ChatGPT - Nov '22

API's 66% cheaper - Aug '22

Embeddings 500x cheaper while SoTA - Dec '22

ChatGPT API. Also 10x cheaper while SoTA - March '23

Whisper API - March '23

GPT-4 - March '23

Plugins - March '23

Note that they have only a few hundred employees. To quote Fireship from YouTube: "2023 has been a crazy decade so far"

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Their superpower is having a tech giant owning 49% of them, willing to drop deep deep money, without the obvious payoff. :)

I also wonder to what extent their staffing numbers reflect reality. How much of Azure's staffing has been put on OpenAI projects? That's probably an actual reflection of the real cost of this thing.

> How much of Azure's staffing has been put on OpenAI projects?

Great point!

It's probably burning through tens of millions per day and it still doesn't matter, this is fusion power in electricity terms. Free money down the line after the initial investment. I'll pay, you'll pay, your neighbour's dog will pay for this.

Yes, but other orgs have similar resources. Most obvious is Google/Deepmind. Apple too. Neither of them made this leap.

The DoD really needs to step in and mark this tech as non-exportable due to the advantage (or potential advantage) it provides in many different fields.

Russia is already blocked from ChatGPT and Bing; I don't know about China.

But it's all security theater. Plenty of people use it with VPNs, and I know several who found it useful / interesting enough to bother paying for it (which involves foreign credit cards etc so it's kind of a hassle). I'm sure so does the Russian govt.

In any case, I don't see how you could realistically block any of that without effectively walling off the rest of the Internet.

Not exportable often means just not available on the Internet at all. Due to a range of factors, such as the dilution of human content online, the inability to prevent bad actors from using it etc I would rather this tech never saw the light of day and was limited to government and research institutions.

It never works like that with tech. Especially not this kind of tech, where all the building blocks have been around for some time and are well-understood - just not the result of combining them at this scale.

In any case, if it's really that powerful, limiting it to one government sounds like a recipe for the worst kind of a one world state to me.

I am from China, the Chinese government has banned access to chatgpt related products and Baidu has launched the 文心一言 which is basically gpt-3.

Wait, do you mean it's on par with GPT-3, or it's literally GPT-3? If the latter, how did they get the model?

Working at a chinese university. Everyone (students and teachers) using chatgpt, officially openai don't let you access from china. but everyone has vpns, even the university internet is all behind a hong kong vpn (as google etc is useful).

It does all feel like weird theatre that just makes anything american slightly annoying to use. So theres local startups and researchers working on replicating these things and making them easier to access.

If the usa dont want to make products available to the whole world out some combination of fear and patriotism, then china will instead.

If China does not have Google equivalent and chinese people are instead forced to use Google via vpn, what makes you think China will make some AI-related product available to the whole world?

It will most likely be a closely-guarded secret one, no?

Google can't even keep up with OpenAI. I wouldn't expect much out of China in this space.

Yeah, I'd be really curious to hear how much people within OpenAI use their tools to create and ship their code. That would be quite a compelling testimony, and also help me feel more clear, because I've been quite confused at how quickly things have been going for them.

what makes you think they are leaders at applying the tech they create?

I've seen tweets that suggest they are using it, particularly, the prerelease GPT-4 was used internally.

> "2023 has been a crazy decade so far"

what a couple weeks!

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