But the bulk of the tasks can probably be solved at 3.5 level, another more difficult chunk with 4, I'm wondering how many of the requests will be so complex as to require GPT-5. Probably less than 1%.
There's a significant distinction between web search and generative AI. You can't download "a Google" but you can download "a LLaMA". This marks the end of the centralisation era and increased user freedom. Engaging in chat and image generation without being tracked is now possible while searching, browsing the web or torrenting are still tracked.
It is worth $20 a month to have one UI on one service that does everything.
Unless specialized models can far exceed what GPT4 can do, being general purpose is amazing.
IMHO the future is APIs written for consumption by LLMs, and then natural language interfaces and just telling an AI literally anything you want done.
competition will drive profit margins and prices down to nothing because the number of companies that can spin up an UI is unlimited. Markets don't pay you what something is worth, they pay what the cheapest participant is willing to sell it for.
I strongly suspect the profit margin on ChatGPT is already pretty low!
> Markets don't pay you what something is worth, they pay what the cheapest participant is willing to sell it for.
Correction: Markets pay what companies are able to convince consumers to pay. Some products bring negative value to the buyer, but are still sold for hundreds of millions of dollars (see: enterprise sales and integrations, which oftentime fail).
I believe 'what something is worth' is defined as what the market is willing to pay.
And sometimes the customer will pay for something that isn't the cheapest of something, which is why I'm writing this on a mac.
Today it is. When there is an open source, capable “one UI for everything” that runs locally and can consume external services as needed (but keeps your data locally otherwise), will it still be?
OpenAI and MS are going to win because they have a package to go and it’s ready and available and working well - they have set the benchmark. I’m not seeing any evidence of this in the OSS community thus far.
Until I can spin up a docker image capable of the same as OpenAI in hetzner for 30 bucks a month - it’s not in the same league.
Yes, you are right
That’s irrelevant to the point of this, which is about the dynamics of the market over a longer window than “what is available to use immediately today”, because a “moat” is a different thing than “a current lead”.
I do exactly this with https://github.com/nsarrazin/serge
Hetzner will install any hardware you send them for $100. So you can send them a $200 P40 24GB to run 33B parameter GPU models at ChatGPT speeds without increasing your monthly cost.
[1] https://www.proshop.fi/Naeytoenohjaimet/HP-Tesla-P40-24GB-GD...
I am not sure the pessimism is warranted. True that few people have the need to upgrade from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 now, but if GPT-5 is another serious leap in capabilities, it might have an effect closer to the difference between old chatbots (useless, interesting) and ChatGPT (immediate economic impact, transforming some jobs). Or at any rate, we should expect such a leap to occur soon, even if it's not GPT-5.
But the moat problem addressed in the article remains. Good luck patenting your amazing UI change in such a way that open source models can't catch up within a few weeks.
I wonder if this effect will be compounded by regulatory pressure that seems poised to slow down progress at the bleeding edge of LLMs.
Open source closing the gap at the bottom, and governments restricting further movement at the top...
Don't believe me? Go look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest . Maybe once a month you find something on here that is actually from an expert who knows what they're talking about and hasn't written a book on it yet, or a pet project by an incredibly talented person who has no idea it was submitted.
Source: I've been here for 14 years. That makes me a little depressed...
This was leaked, not intentionally made public.
And it all makes sense -- the people producing these types of business analyses are world-class experts in their fields (the business strategy not just the tech), and are paid handsomely for that.
The "regular stuff" people consume is written by journalists who are usually a bit more "jack of all trades master of none". A journalist might cover the entire consumer tech industry, not LLM's specifically. They can't produce this kind of analysis, nor should we expect them to.
Industry experts are extremely valuable for a reason, and they don't bother writing analyses for public media since it doesn't pay as well.
In the case of this analysis - it sounds great but it’s wrong. OpenAI has a huge moat. It has captured the mind share of the world. The software it has shipped is dramatically better than anything anyone else has shipped (the difference between useless and useful). We’ll see if folks catch up, but the race is currently OpenAI’s to lose.
Moats are very specific things such as network effects, customers with sunk costs, etc. The very point of the term "moat" is to distinguish it from things like market share or mind share.
The article is correct, OpenAI has no moat currently.
That's literally the opposite of what "moat" means, so no. You can't just make up different definitions for accepted terms if you want to have a productive conversation with anyone.
The only exception would be if my name were super recognizable/I had some legitimacy I could “sell” to publish something that did have commercial value, like some shitty CIO-targeted “article” about why XYZ is the future, in which case it’s not really going to be interesting content or actually sharing ideas.
It really sucks because there’s definitely a chilling effect knowing any personal opinion expressed in text at a big tech company could end up in a headline like “GOOGLE SAYS <hot take>” because of a leak.
If there is some kind of really bad behavior being exposed, I think the role of the media is to help do that. But I don’t think their role should be to expose any leaked internal document they can get their hands on.
I don’t think the media should share stuff like this just because it’s interesting. They’re making a market for corporate espionage to sell clicks.
You generally won't find papers detailing the present-moment business strategies of specific for-profit corporations.
I'll ask my first question here below, so that if you have an answer it can benefit other HNers, and I'll save the other line of thought for email.
Do you happen to have a list of other highest quality articles on AI/LLMs/etc that you've come across, and could share here?
It's not my field but something I want to learn more about, and I've found it hard to, without knowing much about the specific subjects within AI that would be good to learn about makes it hard picking what to read or not.