Seems like OpenAI is exploring its own devices/OS as well, which makes sense to me, but it’s a vertical integration bet. This seems to be another big bet, but they could benefit from having their own optimized chips regardless of whether the device/OS bet wins out.
Extremely exciting times for OpenAI!
As far as gives you a competitive edge! For AI, to win you need better data and compute than your competitors.
Going up the stack to consumer devices seems like a somewhat speculative move, though I understand the underlying desire to secure a data moat.
Going down the stack to chips makes a lot of sense; if you can secure an edge in compute efficiency then you will beat anybody that doesn't have substantially more data than you do.
To me, it seems like a distraction for them to go into devices stuff, rather than making their stuff so relevant that device vendors (Android/iOS) can't ignore. At the moment they can because they got good enough competitor solutions.
If they found a theoretical way to infer something like GPT-3.5 without using so much RAM and can build a chip which makes this feasible in laptops or (holy grail) phones, they've got their moat for a 12-24 months, possibly more if they manage to patent it. Big if though.
But you could build a device with more memory...
If they just make android phones better, they risk Google benefitting off their efforts and replacing the models. Besides that’s a lot more work to partner and manage across the industry.
It seems risky to bet they can release consumer hardware (instead of server side) but that’s the ultimate big bet. Ask Meta how it feels to be “just an app”.