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Comment by icapybara | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see all these companies building products wholly off of OpenAI's platform. What happens if OpenAI changes their mind about pricing or access some day? Isn't this an existential risk to all "AI" companies that don't actually do the AI part?

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There's some risk here, but there's also risk utilizing any third party services for key parts of your business. If OpenAI increased pricing significantly or eliminated access (both of which seem unrealistic), there will likely be plenty of alternatives soon to fall back on. I wouldn't avoid creating an AI product because of this remote possibility.

> there will likely be plenty of alternatives soon to fall back on

Are there? OpenAI is currently the only provider. Big tech companies (Google, MS, Meta, maybe Apple) may also soon have similar models but they don't have much incentive to sell access to them. Smaller orgs can't produce GPT-level AI. It feels like all these products are really at the mercy of OpenAI.

There has been an explosion of effort around LLama, but Meta did the hard part (the base model), and who knows if they will do that again.

Claude from Anthropic already has an API and its likely that Bard will have an API as well. It's just the most basic way to monetize your model.

https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all

This is one of many, many open LLM models that are approaching GPT level now. They're not on the same level yet, but given the rate of progress in this field, it's safe to say that OpenAI's moat will not be there forever.

Also, their level is already sufficient for A LOT of tasks that people use OpenAI's APIs now.

my guess is that many of these companies are hoping to be acquired by OpenAI or Microsoft.

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