[HN Gopher] OpenAI is in talks for tender offer that would value...
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       OpenAI is in talks for tender offer that would value it at $29B
        
       Author : EMM_386
       Score  : 110 points
       Date   : 2023-01-05 20:27 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
        
       | magic_man wrote:
       | Does Elon still have stake in it?
        
         | bink wrote:
         | He had to completely disconnect from OpenAI due to the conflict
         | of interest with Tesla AI.
        
           | doutunlined wrote:
           | No wonder it succeeded.
        
             | misiti3780 wrote:
             | lol - tesla, spacex, etc didnt succeed ? what planet are
             | you living on?
        
               | fieldcny wrote:
               | Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Let's see how many of
               | those are around when we actually go through a full
               | business cycle. No company started since 2003 has really
               | been through a real downturn. 2007/2008 was limited in
               | its blast radius and the fed just threw money
               | everywhere...
        
               | rockemsockem wrote:
               | So 20 years for Tesla and 21 years for SpaceX is a
               | sprint? What amount of time is a marathon? Facebook was
               | founded in 2004, Google in 1998, are they still just
               | sprinting?
        
               | tluyben2 wrote:
               | It is hip on Twitter to say he just bought it all (with
               | daddy's money is even better to note) and knows nothing.
               | As in: without getting free money he cannot succeed, only
               | break. Link to an image of collapsing Tesla price.
               | 
               | It's boring; chatgpt is great or skynet and either Musk
               | is god or Musk is worthless is most of my Twitter
               | timeline.
        
               | aliqot wrote:
               | it's great, but it's also skynet's latest iteration.
               | let's not kid ourselves while we're blinded by the new
               | shiny.
        
               | LudwigNagasena wrote:
               | Let's not kid ourselves. Boring mass surveillance
               | dystopia powered by fancy curve fitting algorithms is not
               | going to be anything like Skynet.
        
               | pessimizer wrote:
               | Algorithmic dragnets running over all communications
               | technology, every human carrying a microphone everywhere
               | that they don't have control over, and walking killer
               | robots sound very much like Skynet. The big difference is
               | that it won't be run by an overarching AI, but by the
               | grandchildren of the people who own everything _now._
        
               | spaceman_2020 wrote:
               | I don't know how rich Musk's dad is, but even if he was a
               | billionaire, turning a billion into combined $1T+
               | marketcap companies is an incredible achievement.
        
               | tluyben2 wrote:
               | Yes, but many of course think they would do equally well
               | or better. And then many others are just trolling.
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | To be a bit more specific, I recall the separation happening
           | because Musk poached Karpathy from OpenAI, which was against
           | an agreement.
        
           | metadat wrote:
           | Musk impregnated an OpenAI board member last year [0]. What
           | kind of separation is that?
           | 
           | [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/7/23198199/elon-musk-
           | childre...
        
       | Jabbles wrote:
       | _some investors have expressed skepticism that the company can
       | generate meaningful revenue from the technology_
       | 
       | Would anyone like to speculate as to how they could?
        
       | berkle4455 wrote:
       | The tech bubble has a ways to deflate still
        
         | pessimizer wrote:
         | But tbf, language models/deep learning (and their near-future
         | improvements) are real, practical technologies with pretty
         | unlimited applications i.e. not bitcoin. Buying in at this
         | semi-early stage is going to pay off massively and
         | effortlessly, really the only challenge is to win a bidding war
         | without being saddled with so much debt that you go bankrupt
         | before you become an institution.
        
       | 1970-01-01 wrote:
       | How long until we see 100% custom generated online ads? For $29B
       | valuation, that should be a WordPress plug-in.
        
       | EGreg wrote:
       | Oh great. And whoever buys OpenAI could do a lot of nefarious
       | things for profit...
       | 
       | Who remembers fogbugz fondly?
        
         | laluser wrote:
         | Did you read the article? It's an investment round...
        
       | greatpostman wrote:
       | Funny that a relatively small highly competent company like
       | openai has created a stir that none of the big companies could.
       | The 10x engineer theory is alive and well. A tale as old as time,
       | large "prestigious" corporations incapable of innovating,
       | probably due to management being unwilling to cannabalize their
       | own jobs and knowledge _cough_ google _cough_
        
         | transcriptase wrote:
         | The odds were truly stacked against this scrappy group of well-
         | connected billionaires, supported by the largest tech companies
         | in Silicon Valley, able to hire the top talent in the world,
         | originally touted as a non-profit that would democratize AI
         | instead of gate-keeping it for the profit/benefit of the
         | aforementioned.
         | 
         | At least they didn't say "sike" as soon as the tech was good
         | enough to monetize and pivot to being a for-profit tech company
         | in itsel- oh.
        
           | greatpostman wrote:
           | Agree they had an unlimited budget and hired true top talent.
           | But my point still stands, none of the big companies are
           | spinning up a group of 200 people in a new org and releasing
           | game changing products. They can only do it by funding
           | external groups. Facebooks whole business model was hiring
           | expensive engineers that are good at executing and just
           | copying any new competitors product.
        
             | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
             | So what's your point exactly? First OpenAI has 10x
             | engineers that Google doesn't, now Google has the 10x
             | engineers, as you acknowledged you know OpenAI used Google
             | Brain's trsnsformer architecture, but it just isn't
             | productising fast enough for you? You do realize OpenAI
             | hasn't made a dime yet, right? So your so called 10x dream
             | is just time to market? Not inovation, or releasing a real
             | product?
        
             | nickthegreek wrote:
             | Google has their own gpt AI, it's just not released to the
             | public.
        
               | greatpostman wrote:
               | Exactly, management is still riding the gravy train and
               | won't risk their now obsolete business model
        
               | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
               | You do realize Google relaeses more products than anyone,
               | right? (In fact, too many.) But with just an AI chatbot,
               | there really isn't much of a product in it's current
               | state. But lets say there is this massive product that
               | Google is hiding, I'm really struggling to understand how
               | Google releasing it risks their "now obsolete business
               | model." I mean, what exactly is your claim here? Google
               | has this killer product, but they aren't releasing it and
               | putting ads on it because... they want to let someone
               | else do it? But they _are_ still publishing the very
               | research that will obsolete thier business model at no
               | charge?
        
           | Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
           | Amazing points. The day of the dorm-room student billionaire
           | is already over. This said, GP's comment has some value. If
           | we take "relatively small company" to mean number of
           | employees (although this wasn't made clear) then there is
           | some truth to the idea that a new, unencumbered company can
           | do more than an established one. But I feel GP is minimizing
           | Microsoft, Google and Nvidia's contributions to ML research,
           | and perhaps overplaying OpenAI's role in pitting it against
           | other players when clearly everyone is building on each
           | other's result. GPT uses a transformer architecture, which
           | was created by Google Brain, and the first GPT paper alone
           | cites 71 other papers, each, in turn, citing their own...
        
         | vineyardmike wrote:
         | > The 10x engineer theory is alive and well.
         | 
         | > due to management being unwilling to cannabalize their own
         | jobs
         | 
         | Sounds like a 0.5x engineer could still have produced the
         | desired output if the alternative is a manager that resisted
         | change. Was it incredible engineers, or bad managers? Both?
        
         | nfRfqX5n wrote:
         | But the big companies have infinitely more data, which will be
         | more useful in the long run
        
           | spaceman_2020 wrote:
           | None of the current crop of big companies are being led by
           | founder-CEOs - except for Meta. They're all being led by
           | manager-CEOs.
           | 
           | Manager-CEOs, historically, don't have the stakes, the
           | vision, or the sheer pull to cannibalize $100B existing
           | business lines with a brand new, untested product.
           | 
           | Big Tech's bigness will be its biggest liability. A chatGPT-
           | like tool, for instance, competes against Google's search
           | products. And Google can't monetize it with 10+ ads on every
           | page.
           | 
           | Google et al will dawdle and hem and haw and watch nimbler
           | competitors take away market share. Tale as old as time.
        
           | greatpostman wrote:
           | Actually it turned out to be the opposite, vanilla data
           | scraped from the internet is feeding these models
        
             | spiderice wrote:
             | How is that the opposite? Big tech companies have all the
             | vanilla data scraped from the internet, plus WAY more.
             | Obviously both together will be more valuable than just the
             | former.
        
               | greatpostman wrote:
               | A team of 10 talented engineers can scrape and store that
               | data. It won't be perfect, but it's nowhere near the
               | barrier that people assumed.
        
               | lostmsu wrote:
               | 1 engineer can handle that alone. The Pile is under 1TB.
               | The tech is there to do it from a phone in under a month.
        
         | romeros wrote:
         | Sama is an Entrepreneur. Most major stable companies are
         | typically run by the MBA types, Execs etc who won't be taking
         | any major risks. Risking their reputation, rocking the boat aka
         | Status Quo etc. If the risk doesn't pay off they are screwed.
         | If they maintain the status quo it will take a long time before
         | consequences catch up.
         | 
         | That's why Elon, Zuck, Steve Jobs etc make major singular
         | decisions without much bureaucracy standing in their way.
        
         | barrkel wrote:
         | They have less reputation to risk. Big tech and so on can't put
         | out AI prototypes as easily without ending up on the front page
         | of NYT when it comes out with some egregious learned biases
         | around race, sexism, Nazis, and so on.
        
           | greatpostman wrote:
           | I find this very hard to believe. Microsoft is also working
           | on integrating chatgpt. But chatgpt itself probably could
           | never have been built within Microsoft. Managers gate keeping
           | their own jobs won't allow it
        
             | matwood wrote:
             | How quickly we forget Tay.
             | 
             | https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-
             | ch...
        
         | ur-whale wrote:
         | >probably due to management being unwilling to cannabalize
         | their own jobs and knowledge
         | 
         | Disagree.
         | 
         | The reason Google does not innovate anymore wether AI or
         | elsewhere:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0UXIFoCbXog
        
         | Ozzie_osman wrote:
         | It's less about engineering ability. For sure, OpenAI has
         | phenomenal technical talent, but large tech co's do too, and in
         | fact, many of them have internal developments that match (maybe
         | exceed) GPT3 / ChatGPT.
         | 
         | It's more about organizational bureaucracy, innovator's
         | dilemma, organizational priority, risk tolerance given the
         | scrutiny they're under, etc.
        
           | mccorrinall wrote:
           | > internal developments that match (maybe exceed) GPT3
           | 
           | Had a funny google prompt today which echoed wrong results by
           | their ML model:
           | https://www.google.com/search?q=single%20neighbor%20country
           | 
           | :D
        
           | matwood wrote:
           | > It's more about organizational bureaucracy, innovator's
           | dilemma, organizational priority, risk tolerance given the
           | scrutiny they're under, etc.
           | 
           | Agree. Being on the right side of all those items also
           | attracts more top talent.
        
           | htrp wrote:
           | > It's more about organizational bureaucracy, innovator's
           | dilemma, organizational priority, risk tolerance given the
           | scrutiny they're under, etc.
           | 
           | The paypal argument
        
         | p1esk wrote:
         | You do realize that Google invented the transformer
         | architecture, and OpenAI has simply scaled it up?
        
           | greatpostman wrote:
           | Yeah I am completely aware. They invented it and search got
           | even more useless.
        
           | rockemsockem wrote:
           | I fail to see how that is an argument against what the parent
           | comment said. Google invented transformers and OpenAI made it
           | into something compelling. More compelling than what Google
           | has done with it.
        
             | p1esk wrote:
             | Google invented the engine and OpenAI took that engine and
             | built a car. Both deserve credit.
        
               | rockemsockem wrote:
               | I agree with that, but ultimately how the transformer
               | architecture is used in products is what's going to
               | change things and create new value for humanity.
        
             | endisneigh wrote:
             | The difference is that OpenAI is well, open and usable and
             | Google's offerings are not.
        
               | albntomat0 wrote:
               | It seems to me that such a split could be because OpenAI
               | has decided that ChatGPT needs to be public to get hype,
               | partners, investment, training data, etc. Google many not
               | need or want those things.
               | 
               | It's definitely possible that ChatGPT is way better than
               | LaMDA, but I wouldn't take the availability of a public
               | demo as proof of that.
        
             | nickthegreek wrote:
             | Google apparently has a bot that can put ChatGPT to shame,
             | it's just not released to the public.
        
       | lost_tourist wrote:
       | This sounds like another twitter deal; overvalued by a lot.
        
       | big_blind wrote:
       | Paywall: https://archive.is/G9M4E
       | 
       | It's still crazy to me how rapidly AI has grown in mainstream
       | popularity and relevance in the past year. Curious to see this
       | new market develop now with competitors like You.com's YouChat
       | coming onto the scene.
        
       | kats wrote:
       | Lol professional BS artists.
        
       | minimaxir wrote:
       | It's funny how "ChatGPT Creator" is now more recognizeable/SEO-
       | friendly than "OpenAI".
        
       | cinntaile wrote:
       | I wonder how they come up with these valuations for deep learning
       | companies? Some other company always seems to be able to pretty
       | much replicate the performance a few weeks or months later, what
       | is the moat here?
        
         | htrp wrote:
         | Usually its about the network effects....
         | 
         | OpenAI can claim the most usage and therefore the ability to
         | see the newest language model tricks.
        
       | japanman425 wrote:
       | Can wait to pay for factually wrong chat not answers instead of
       | getting them for free!
        
       | endisneigh wrote:
       | How much money does OpenAI make I wonder?
        
       | ttobbaybbob wrote:
       | from the openai charter (https://openai.com/charter/): "Our
       | primary fiduciary duty is to humanity."
       | 
       | i wonder how committed they currently are to ^ and what taking
       | external investment would/will do to that commitment. Echoes of
       | "dont be evil"
        
         | karmakurtisaani wrote:
         | This is something you always say as start-up. It gets you good
         | pr and possibly cheaper and idealistic engineers. Then you
         | struggle towards your "mission" until you can sell out when the
         | numbers get big enough. No one will not sell out when there are
         | billions on the table.
        
         | lelandfe wrote:
         | Microsoft invested in them years back:
         | https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/
        
       | LarsDu88 wrote:
       | Honestly they move to be acquired. AI is destined to be the
       | future of tech, but it's going to be the data that decides who
       | wins. Once an algorithm is out in the wild, anyone with money can
       | copy, train, and deploy it IF they have the data.
       | 
       | OpenAI has done some amazing RnD, but it is the big tech firms
       | have all the data. Acquisition by a company like Microsoft is
       | probably the most likely thing that will happen.
       | 
       | Sidenote: If a basic multiplayer vector graphics editor like
       | Figma is worth 20 Billion, OpenAI can get a much higher price
       | IMO!
        
         | Yhippa wrote:
         | I was thinking about this. You take something like ChatGPT,
         | point it at all your company's documentation, and boom, instant
         | customer service. Pretty darn good customer service based on my
         | experience. Feels like it will instantly invalidate all
         | existing customer service chatbots once this propagates.
        
           | nullsense wrote:
           | What about it confidently just making plausible sounding but
           | false things up? That doesn't make for good customer
           | service...
        
             | ZephyrBlu wrote:
             | They're very aware of that. I expect GPT-4 will improve on
             | it, especially given the rumours about it being a big
             | improvement over GPT-3/chatGPT.
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/sama/status/1601731295792414720
        
           | ceejayoz wrote:
           | Assuming, of course, good documentation, which is probably
           | the hard part.
        
             | elil17 wrote:
             | Just point it at your code to generate documentation (not
             | now, but that's the endgame)
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | endisneigh wrote:
           | Lol, much easier said than done.
        
           | hooande wrote:
           | is any company doing this or something similar right now? I
           | really don't think it works this way, but I'd love to see an
           | example of how I'm wrong.
        
         | spaceman_2020 wrote:
         | Tbh, people have tried and made many tools like Figma, but I'm
         | yet to see anything that comes even close to Figma's speed.
         | There's some incredible engineering under the hood.
        
           | preommr wrote:
           | Can you give some examples of other tools that you've found
           | to be slow?
           | 
           | I am also curious how you'd rank the performance of something
           | like "https://w00dn.github.io/papergrapher/"
        
         | ZephyrBlu wrote:
         | Figma was a strategic acquisition. You can't directly compare
         | companies for acquisition.
         | 
         | Microsoft has invested in OpenAI and has a deal with them,
         | Google has their own algos, Meta has their own algos. Who would
         | acquire OpenAI and why would they pay so much? It seems like it
         | would mostly be an acquihire and maybe getting ahead by 1-2yrs.
         | 
         | Is that really worth >$30B, especially given that interest
         | rates are no longer 0%?
         | 
         | I also don't think your point about big tech firms having all
         | the data makes sense. The transformer architecture that GPT is
         | based on has been around since 2017. How did OpenAI create and
         | scale GPT if they didn't have the data?
         | 
         | I think OpenAI is going to try and be the go-to platform for
         | new AI companies rather than looking for an acquisition.
        
         | preommr wrote:
         | > If a basic multiplayer vector graphics editor like Figma is
         | worth 20 Billion, OpenAI can get a much higher price IMO
         | 
         | Figma is only worth that much because of Adobe's incompetence.
         | 
         | Companies in the same space as OpenAI are much more capable.
        
         | allUrd4t4 wrote:
         | [dead]
        
         | STELLANOVA wrote:
         | I honestly think that what you are describing is just a part of
         | transition and that data will stop being interesting anymore
         | but actual algorithms and way the data is consumed. Similar
         | thing happened with the books centuries ago. Not everyone had
         | access to the books and only wealthy and church had control
         | under it, knowledge was not accessible like it's today, yet
         | that didn't change anything once it become accessible, what
         | matters almost always is what you do with it.
         | 
         | I was always wondering if we would progress faster in many
         | ML/AI stuff if big companies exchanged data they collected (raw
         | data). Take self driving stuff for example, dozens of companies
         | spending tons of resources just to collect the data (that is
         | btw public - streets, other vehicles, publicly exposed objects,
         | people...). Imagine if they all exchanged raw data, we would be
         | years faster in development and they would actually focus on
         | things that matter (actual ML/AI models)...
        
         | zzz345345 wrote:
         | > Once an algorithm is out in the wild,
         | 
         | but OpenAI is not open
         | 
         | It's a bit like the "PATRIOT" Act that isnt patriotic.
        
         | dmitryminkovsky wrote:
         | I was with you until "basic" :) Figma is an amazing beast!
         | 
         | Also your comment seems to correctly throw into question the
         | sustained long-term value of OpenAI. Figma will undoubtedly
         | keep delivering value for years to come.
        
         | fishtoaster wrote:
         | I feel like Figma and OpenAI are apples and oranges.
         | 
         | Figma is a really strong _business_. You can show spreadsheets
         | and charts to make a pretty convincing case that it 'll make a
         | lot of money. It's not terribly risky.
         | 
         | OpenAI is really strong tech without much product market fit.
         | It's got a ton of mindshare, but that's about it. Buying them
         | is making a big bet that you can somehow turn that into a big
         | business.
         | 
         | So one is a low-risk, medium-reward buy, and the other is a
         | high-risk, high-reward buy. Even if OpenAI ultimately changes
         | the world a lot more, its expected value _now_ is close(ish) to
         | Figma 's.
        
           | STELLANOVA wrote:
           | Other way to look at it is that you look at Figma as a
           | product and OpenAI as a platform. What you will do with the
           | platform is up to you. It's not easy to productize something
           | like that and get good revenue - it's much riskier BUT if you
           | already have many products in your portfolio (like MSFT) it's
           | actually really good fit as you may enhance your existing
           | product line...
        
           | marvin wrote:
           | > OpenAI is really strong tech without much product market
           | fit. It's got a ton of mindshare, but that's about it. Buying
           | them is making a big bet that you can somehow turn that into
           | a big business.
           | 
           | That's the YouTube argument. "Yeah, everyone uses it but it's
           | not like they're able to make money", stated about a company
           | that's iterating its products faster than viable competition
           | can react. In this case regarding one of a few actors in the
           | world that can plausibly access the computing resources
           | required to build on the bleeding edge.
           | 
           | They've made something people want; they'll be successful.
        
           | devmunchies wrote:
           | > OpenAI is really strong tech without much product market
           | fit
           | 
           | I wouldn't say that. There are a lot of companies making
           | money on it already, there's definitely a market for it. They
           | just aren't monetizing. It's more like how "growth startups"
           | acquired users at a loss before turning on the monetization
           | engine.
        
             | wahnfrieden wrote:
             | how much is early adopter exploration?
        
               | devmunchies wrote:
               | I meant there are other companies who are building their
               | entire companies (not just features) on OpenAI's products
               | and those companies have revenue. Been going on for a
               | couple years. I was at one such startup.
               | 
               | They are kind of like a Stripe or Twilio in that sense
               | (in their current form)
        
             | luckydata wrote:
             | Which companies are making money on it? I'm talking billion
             | dollars.
             | 
             | None.
        
               | devmunchies wrote:
               | How would we know? they'd still be private. A billion in
               | revenue is like a public company 3-5 years after IPO. The
               | aggregate probably is making quite a bit, though.
        
       | WheelsAtLarge wrote:
       | Chatgpt is the first mover but I doubt it will be around for
       | long. Competition is starting and history has shown that other
       | players eventually find a profitable business model and leave the
       | first mover behind.
       | 
       | Chatgpt is good but as soon as there's something better people
       | will shift over very quickly.
       | 
       | One thing it lacks is reliability. You can't trust its answers
       | all the time. I suspect the next goal is to create reliable
       | expert systems that people can trust. I see a future where
       | companies will buy access to a reliable expert ai that will help
       | their workers do their job.
       | 
       | Eventually there will be so many expert systems that they can be
       | tied together to create what seems like super ai. It won't be a
       | thinking machine but it won't matter. It will be so realistic
       | that people will believe it's a sentient machine. I bet it will
       | happen in less than 30 yrs.
       | 
       | Imagine a company like AWS renting their AI system to do a
       | specific function. It's going to be interesting.
        
         | ignoramous wrote:
         | > _Chatgpt is the first mover but I doubt it will be around for
         | long._
         | 
         | Upstarts have been at chat bots for a good part of the entire
         | decade (albeit in a different setting, even BigTech had a swing
         | at it: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple Siri). ChatGPT isn't
         | the first mover, but rather something that has captured the
         | imagination of a large section of early adopters.
        
           | luma wrote:
           | Comparing ChatGPT to Siri, Alexa, etc is like comparing the
           | old Windows Mobile to the first iPhone when it came out. Same
           | thing, kinda, but the implementation is so far beyond the
           | existing offerings that it feels like a new thing altogether.
        
         | onion2k wrote:
         | GPT4 will replace it, which is also from OpenAI.
        
         | jchanimal wrote:
         | It's probably important for us to raise the alarm that machines
         | cannot be sentient.
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | I think "AI" is way overhyped.
         | 
         | That said, because of the competition driving the value of the
         | _technology_ down, with open source versions and constant
         | iterations and improvements, I think the value will be in
         | having some  "enterprise" version and associated relationships
         | that make it friendly / easy to buy for large businesses. The
         | Bing partnership and whole Microsoft angle suggest Open AI is
         | in a good spot to be an enterprise provider
        
         | screye wrote:
         | OpenAI has 3 unique advantages that others don't.
         | 
         | Namely : Sam Altman, Microsoft and self-fulfilling prophecies.
         | 
         | 1. Sam Altman - OpenAI does relationships like no other
         | company. They are getting doors opened to data that others
         | (even big companies) simply do not have access to. having
         | Altman at the helm has a lot to do with it. He is also the
         | reason OpenAI is arguably second only to Tesla in terms of
         | being a self-marketing behemoth with no real marketing budget.
         | The super-fans do all the talking for you.
         | 
         | 2. Microsoft - Whatever the fine-print of their relationship
         | is, despite not owning OpenAI, Microsoft is throwing its entire
         | weight behind them. This means that the entities who can
         | compete on compute and endless money supply are Google and
         | Amazon. The fact that Microsoft obscures its relationship with
         | OpenAI, also means that OpenAI gets to move with the sort of
         | agility and goodwill, that something branded MSFT/AMZN/GOOG
         | simply cannot.
         | 
         | 3. Self-fulfilling prophecies - These models get better with
         | human in the loop (HITL) feedback. OpenAI is the one getting
         | the most human in the loop feedback due to being first movers
         | and that lets them make better models. The better models mean
         | that users keep coming back to OpenAI to give more HITL
         | feedback.
         | 
         | (This is more so true with NLP than Vision. Vision has a
         | healthy set of competitors across the board)
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | > 3. Self-fulfilling prophecies
           | 
           | This is a bit off-topic, but I have been thinking that if
           | LLMs lead to near AGI, then we are indeed doomed to an AI
           | takeover as there is ton of human-generated stories about
           | that to learn from. Maybe we should start writing a lot more
           | tech-utopian stories to improve our chances? /half-serious
        
             | nullsense wrote:
             | >as there is ton of human-generated stories about that to
             | learn from.
             | 
             | Oh snap. Hoisted by our own petard!
        
               | consumer451 wrote:
               | I nervously laugh about it, but ever since this occurred
               | to me I get the feeling that it's almost too predictable,
               | poetic, and plainly dumb-as-a-species _not_ to happen.
        
               | nullsense wrote:
               | It's an amusing insight. You've got me nervously laughing
               | about it too.
               | 
               | How do the machines know what tastywheat really tasted
               | like? My guess is they read the script for The Matrix and
               | learned that accurately mimicking the tastes of foods
               | would be necessary to get the mind to accept the
               | illusion.
        
             | gregw2 wrote:
             | I've said it before, also half-seriously
             | (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33953367)... it
             | doesn't help that our best thinkers and engineers are
             | trying ensure an AI passes the Turing Test, but the Turing
             | Test as a goal inherently is about an AI deceiving human
             | perceptions as to its nature and intentions and awareness,
             | rather than generating/purveying truth (or beauty or
             | justice or the good!)
             | 
             | It was a clever idea of Turing's to sidestep the definition
             | of intelligence (and truth), but not necessarily a wise one
             | for our society to spend billions of dollars and our best
             | minds to prioritize!
             | 
             | Be careful about your goal function!!
        
         | permo-w wrote:
         | hey multivac, can we put the stars back together?
         | 
         | "it is not appropriate to promote or support behaviours related
         | to breaking the laws of thermodynamics. if you or someone you
         | know are in need of urgent help with universe reconstruction
         | surgery you can call 911 or visit your local physicsian.
         | 
         | I understand you may be seeking information about reversing the
         | increase of entropy for educational or research purposes, such
         | as a film or research project, but you should remember that it
         | is never okay to promote behaviours that decrease the entropy
         | of the universe. There are many resources available to help
         | with the inevitable results of the passage of time, including
         | support groups, therapy, and medication
         | 
         | I hope this information is helpful. Please let me know if you
         | have any other questions or need further assistance."
        
         | fieldcny wrote:
         | Can't wait to see it vacuum my floor without smearing dog poo
         | everywhere, falling down the stairs or getting stuck between
         | chairs.
         | 
         | Futurists have been predicting this stuff forever, we live in
         | amazing times, but it's never what it "could be".
        
         | vagabund wrote:
         | Microsoft's willingness to run ChatGPT at a 6 figure loss daily
         | is a strong signal of the value OpenAI's researchers place on
         | RLHF to make the next leap -- both in raw capabilities and
         | alignment. If they're proven correct, which it's likely they
         | are, then the first mover advantage runs unusually deep, given
         | that the feedback-from-usage flywheel is integral to the core
         | tech. Google could, of course, deploy more broadly overnight if
         | they chose, but their positioning seems to indicate more
         | interest in solving hard science problems with AI than with
         | building human-aligned productivity tools and assistants. The
         | market is broad enough for both, and the latter more readily
         | aligns with Microsoft's business, so I expect the trends to
         | continue. No one aside from Google stands a chance at making up
         | OpenAI's lead.
        
           | vineyardmike wrote:
           | > but their positioning seems to indicate more interest in
           | solving hard science problems with AI than with building
           | human-aligned productivity tools and assistants.
           | 
           | Except they literally have a product called "Assistant" that
           | uses language processing today. Sure gAssistant doesn't use a
           | LLM to generate the response... but instead it uses _factual
           | data from the internet_ to generate a response. I imagine
           | they could easily roll out a LLM if they wanted, but surely
           | most queries are just smart-home and weather queries that
           | don't need it.
           | 
           | And they have AI infusion into gmail, Google docs, etc. this
           | is where the actual value of a LLM will live. Chat GPT is
           | cool, but the biggest uses of LLM will surely come from
           | "assistive" tech built into these existing products. Why
           | write a document when you can write an outline and the facts
           | and Google docs will write it for you? We're already getting
           | there with e-mail response autocompletes.
        
         | mywittyname wrote:
         | > Imagine a company like AWS renting their AI system to do a
         | specific function. It's going to be interesting.
         | 
         | This is where I see the money being made. Offer the LEGO bricks
         | startups use to build successful niche products, then steal the
         | most profitable ones.
         | 
         | Amazon Basics Medical Coding AI.
        
       | jonnycomputer wrote:
       | ClosedAI
        
         | clarge1120 wrote:
         | Exactly.
         | 
         | I will be surprised if even GPT-3 (with training data), not to
         | mention GPT-4-5-6 or 7, is made available to the masses.
         | There's too much potential for disruption.
         | 
         | Also, I'd love to be surprised.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | albntomat0 wrote:
       | What is the relative difficult of each required part in training
       | GPT3/ChatGPT? E.g. where is OpenAI's moat, and how wide is it?
       | 
       | Is it in model design (now published), data set, engineering
       | needed to train it, cost of hardware needed to train it, cost of
       | HLRF on top of GPT3 to make ChatGPT?
        
         | mccorrinall wrote:
         | It's easier to train on all github repos if you own github.
         | There is no real alternative to codex.
         | 
         | Stuff like GPT3 is trying to be recreated, but even the
         | eleuther AI guys only collected like 800GB training data, which
         | is much less than what OpenAI has (iirc around 45TB). And
         | apparently their data is very high quality. EleutherAI is
         | pretty much one of the few big model open source competitors
         | with GPT-Neox etc.
         | 
         | Plus openai has great branding.
        
           | albntomat0 wrote:
           | Interesting, thanks for sharing!
           | 
           | I wonder how LaMDA compares performance wise to ChatGPT. I
           | definitely understand why training on Github is an advantage,
           | but I'd expect Google to also be great at getting a good
           | dataset, across the range of things they'd be interested in.
        
         | tootie wrote:
         | Also how the hell do they make money? They began life as a
         | nonprofit and AFAIK have no commerical product.
        
           | albntomat0 wrote:
           | Poking around their website, OpenAI sells API access to
           | DALL-E, and a range of language models. Github Copilot also
           | uses an OpenAI ML model.
           | 
           | Their valuation comes from expectations of the value of
           | future iterations of those.
        
       | Jabbles wrote:
       | I think it is an interesting point of comparison that DeepMind
       | was acquired for $400M in 2014
       | 
       | https://www.reuters.com/article/google-deepmind-idUSL2N0L102...
        
         | aliqot wrote:
         | 2014 was before things got all willynilly to the degree they
         | are now.
        
         | version_five wrote:
         | Is there any evidence it was a good investment at that price?
         | As I understand they are a big money sink and haven't done
         | anything commercially valuable
        
           | JacobThreeThree wrote:
           | It was a good investment because Google doesn't want to see a
           | switch away from their cash-cow search ads business model,
           | therefore controlling and limiting the biggest competitor is
           | a good investment.
        
           | lelandfe wrote:
           | I can see Med-PaLM becoming a valuable product, but I'm not
           | aware of them recouping the cost yet, no.
        
         | ZephyrBlu wrote:
         | OpenAI seems pretty different to DeepMind. DeepMind was
         | exclusively a research lab, whereas OpenAI has been
         | productizing their research.
        
       | neonate wrote:
       | https://archive.ph/3xntP
        
       | alphabetting wrote:
       | Google acquiring Deepmind in 2014 for ~$600M was such a steal in
       | hindsight.
        
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