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Comment by kouru225 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t need to pan out as a way to create AGI though. It just needs to be useful and profitable.

At least from what I've seen and how I've seen others use LLMs, the general consensus seems to be that they're useful for the basics today but are more of a promising tech than something that's already landed.

If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot.

Again I'm in no on way saying this is actually the case, only a hypothetical since the tech is still very new and we don't know what we don't know.

> If OpenAI features were to freeze at what we have today I would be surprised if the company stayed around without a major pivot.

This isn't really true. GPT4 is incredibly useful right now and being used by lots of business processes without any improvements being needed.

Every incremental improvement (eg Gemini 1.5 huge context window) opens up even more possibilities.

AGI isn't required at all.

Very much this. It's incredible what we can do with it - our limiter building louie.ai has been more ourselves than OpenAI. Though of course a better LLM (smarter, faster, cheaper) does enable more.

The main problem with freezing is the moat disappears. Others are steadily catching up, and on specific benchmarks, even surpassing. Groq.com is insane wrt perf.

Groq's competition is nvidia, not open.ai OpenAI can run their models on groq machines as well.

groq has been public on launching an api, so running groq+mixtral vs openai.com (vs others) is a real topic, esp. when ~half of openai's revenue is their api

But it’s costly. It would be even more useful if it were 1000 times cheaper than it is now. And we don’t yet know if OpenAI earns more than it spent on renting cards or not

Sure. Agree with that. But we can be very confident in the price of compute decreasing over time.

(Although we can make inform estimates on OpenAIs cost structure for serving models well enough to guess they are probably breaking even on it, or pretty close to it. Eg listen to the gradient dissent interview with the Together AI founders and it’s clear they are doing the same, and unless you think OpenAI is remarkably worse at serving technology it implies they are in the breaking even ballpark)

And we still don’t need AGI for it to be a great business.

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