It's my primary fear building anything on these models, they can just come eat your lunch once it looks yummy enough. Tread carefully
True, and worse, they're hungry because it's increasingly seeming like "hosting LLMs and charging by the token" is not terribly profitable.
I don't really see a path for the major players that isn't "Sherlock everything that achieves traction".
As long as features like Study Mode are little more than creative prompting, any provider will eventually be able to offer them and offer token-based charging.
- From what I can see many products are rapidly getting past "just prompt engineering the base API". So even though a lot of these things were/are primitive, I don't think it's necessarily a good bet that they will remain so. Though agree in principle - thin API wrappers will be out-competed both by cheaper thin wrappers, or products that are more sophisticated/better than thin wrappers.
- This is, oddly enough, a scenario that is way easier to navigate than the rest of the LLM industry. We know consumer apps, we know consumer apps that do relatively basic (or at least, well understood) things. Success/failure then is way less about technical prowess and more about classical factors like distribution, marketing, integrations, etc.
A good example here is the lasting success of paid email providers. Multiple vendors (MSFT, GOOG, etc.) make huge amounts of money hosting people's email, despite it being a mature product that, at the basic level, is pretty solved, and where the core product can be replicated fairly easily.
The presence of open source/commodity commercial offerings hasn't really driven the price of the service to the floor, though the commodity offerings do provide some pricing pressure.
Most people I saw offer self-hosted emails for groups (student groups etc), it ended up a mess. Compare all that to say ollama, which makes self-hosting LLMs trivial, and they’re stateless.
So I’m not sure email is a good example of commodity not bringing price to the floor.
> In the computing verb sense, refers to the software Sherlock, which in 2002 came to replicate some of the features of an earlier complementary program called Watson.[1]
During the early days of tech, was there prevailing wisdom that software companies would never be able to compete with hardware companies because the hardware companies would always be able to copy them and ship the software with the hardware?
Because I think it's basically the analogous situation. People assume that the foundation model providers have some massive advantage over the people building on top of them, but I don't really see any evidence for this.
A proper learning tool will have history of conversation with the student, understand their knowledge level, have handcrafted curricula (to match whatever the student is supposed to learn), and be less susceptible to hallucination.
OpenAI have a bunch of other things to worry about and won't just pivot to this space.
These days they’ve pivoted to a more enterprise product and are still chugging along.
All bigco today, not only foundational model providers but also in media and other vertical, tend to be a platform for end user. They don’t want middle man.
If you are trying to be a middle man, you should be prepared.
If you want to try and make a quick buck, fine, be quick and go for whatever. If you plan on building a long term business, don't do the most obvious, low effort low hanging fruit stuff.