[HN Gopher] Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond O...
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       Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond OpenAI
        
       Author : jmsflknr
       Score  : 400 points
       Date   : 2024-02-26 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
        
       | bhouston wrote:
       | This is just a smart move by Satya Nadella after the non-standard
       | drama that occurred with OpenAI a few months back where it nearly
       | imploded and then didn't.
       | 
       | You want both a backup for OpenAI as well as negotiating leverage
       | if OpenAI gets too powerful and this achieves both.
        
         | zitterbewegung wrote:
         | I totally agree it's also like the move where Microsoft is at
         | least supporting Linux on their systems and cloud as not a
         | backup but to just close you into their ecosystem . Honestly I
         | could see Microsoft buying Huggingface.
        
           | bhouston wrote:
           | Yes, Microsoft doesn't have to pick the sole winner in AI,
           | but rather they could just start eating the AI ecosystem bit
           | by bit so that they win by default. It is what large players
           | can do. May open themselves up to some scrutiny for too many
           | acquisitions and reducing competition though, but that is a
           | separate issue.
        
             | lostemptations5 wrote:
             | And they are used to that issue too. A long history of it.
        
             | solardev wrote:
             | "Microsoft recommends OpenAI as your default overlord. Did
             | you know it can do everything your current AI can do,
             | sometimes better, but always more profitably for us?
             | [Switch now] [Ask me again in 30 seconds]"
        
             | datadrivenangel wrote:
             | This is how microsoft has been doing data for at least 10
             | years (See databricks).
             | 
             | Step 1: Get the industry leaders to be purchasable via
             | Azure. Step 2: Slowly build your own clone and start
             | stealing user share even though your offering is still
             | worse.
        
           | JimDabell wrote:
           | I've had similar thoughts, Microsoft buying Huggingface would
           | be very similar to them buying GitHub.
        
             | bugglebeetle wrote:
             | Please, god, no. I can't think of two more antithetical
             | companies.
        
           | btown wrote:
           | This has me thinking about the context behind the striking
           | quote in https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-
           | microsoft-swallo... (May 2023, months before the OpenAI
           | drama):
           | 
           | > Nadella [in December 2022] abruptly cut off Lee
           | midsentence, demanding to know how OpenAI had managed to
           | surpass the capabilities of the AI project Microsoft's
           | 1,500-person research team had been working on for decades.
           | "OpenAI built this with 250 people," Nadella said, according
           | to Lee, who is executive vice president and head of Microsoft
           | Research. "Why do we have Microsoft Research at all?"
           | 
           | > At the same time, even as the company began weaving OpenAI
           | into the fabric of Microsoft's products, Nadella decided not
           | to abort Microsoft's own research efforts in AI. During the
           | tense exchange at the December meeting between the Microsoft
           | CEO and Lee, other executives spoke up to defend the work of
           | Microsoft's researchers, including Mikhail Parakhin, who
           | oversees Microsoft's Bing search and Edge browser groups, Lee
           | said. After grilling Lee in the meeting, Nadella called him
           | privately, thanking him for the work Microsoft Research had
           | done to understand and implement OpenAI's work in a way that
           | passed muster for corporate customers. Nadella said he saw
           | Lee's group as a "secret weapon."
           | 
           | While this is entirely speculation, it's easy to imagine that
           | there are many levels of PR magic going on here, to share a
           | quote that on the surface feels "leaked" and "explosive" but,
           | among investors and clients who read beyond the (very good)
           | paywall, actually shores up a narrative that Microsoft has a
           | capability that significantly augments OpenAI's, and allows
           | the existence of MSR to become headline news without even
           | needing a product release.
           | 
           | The Mistral deal feels like yet another step in this
           | direction. Microsoft is not afraid of seeming "messy" in the
           | press as long as it can control the narrative around its
           | value-add to customers in the context of its partnerships. By
           | contrast, the rest of FAANG's more consumer-facing
           | positioning makes it a lot harder for them to maneuver in a
           | similar way.
        
             | karolist wrote:
             | > Nadella [in December 2022] abruptly cut off Lee
             | midsentence, demanding to know how OpenAI had managed to
             | surpass the capabilities of the AI project Microsoft's
             | 1,500-person research team had been working on for decades.
             | "OpenAI built this with 250 people," Nadella said,
             | according to Lee, who is executive vice president and head
             | of Microsoft Research. "Why do we have Microsoft Research
             | at all?"
             | 
             | The answer to that is till Google released the Attention is
             | All You Need paper in 2017 there were no breakthroughs
             | allowing models as we have now to be built, OpenAI being a
             | small and nible team picked up on which direction the wind
             | is blowing with LLMs and quickly brought a product to
             | market whilst MS just did what corps do - move slowly (same
             | for Google etc).
        
               | zitterbewegung wrote:
               | Microsoft research has also been not solely devoted in AI
               | I have seen much in quantum computing and programming
               | language research and general computer science .
        
           | probably_satan wrote:
           | They did that because they can't compete with Linux and had
           | no relevancy in the tech world outside of providing business
           | users with terrible software
        
         | Xenoamorphous wrote:
         | I guess it has a cost, though? I presume OpenAI didn't like
         | this move. If that's the case, what might be the consequences?
        
           | consumer451 wrote:
           | Just to play this out, what possible moves would OpenAI make
           | at this point that they wouldn't have until this happened?
           | 
           | Altman is out there trying to raise ridiculous sums to get
           | away from Azure, didn't he make the first move here?
        
             | bhouston wrote:
             | I think the main move would be some type of true AGI that
             | leads to a hard takeoff scenario, but it isn't clear we are
             | close to that or not.
             | 
             | Basically something that is more than just another bump in
             | the scorecard for GPT 5 over GPT 4. Otherwise it is still
             | just a horse race between relatively interchangeable GPT
             | engines.
        
           | kibwen wrote:
           | There are no consequences for Microsoft. It owns a 49% stake
           | in OpenAI, so the only action that OpenAI could take to hurt
           | Microsoft would be to deliberately destroy its own value.
        
           | bhouston wrote:
           | > I guess it has a cost, though? I presume OpenAI didn't like
           | this move. If that's the case, what might be the
           | consequences?
           | 
           | Until OpenAI releases GPT 5 and it blows everyone away,
           | OpenAI's leverage is constantly decreasing as the gap between
           | their best model and everyone else's best model decreases.
           | 
           | There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry
           | except for pure model performance.
           | 
           | Maybe someone should as ChatGPT what OpenAI should do to
           | maintain long-term leadership in this industry?
        
             | asynchronous wrote:
             | They also have brand recognition, for what it's worth.
             | Every non-engineer in the world practically thinks AI ==
             | ChatGPT.
        
               | ethanbond wrote:
               | Meh, I don't think it's worth much. In a few years
               | that'll be like claiming that so-and-so had name brand
               | recognition for transistors. Most people don't need to
               | care who manufactures their transistors.
        
               | bhouston wrote:
               | Unless your market is direct to end user, end user brand
               | name recognition doesn't matter. In the case of AI, at
               | least so far, the primarily income won't be from end-
               | users directly, but rather via enterprise integrations
               | into existing tools that already have end user market
               | share (e.g. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, VS Code,
               | Notion, etc.)
        
               | donny2018 wrote:
               | It's not necessarily a bad thing. Most people don't know
               | that TSMC exists, or what Microsoft does beyond Windows
               | and Xbox (which are a small fraction of its business).
        
               | ethanbond wrote:
               | Correct, I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said it's not
               | clear that it's a good thing (i.e. an asset)
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | _Most people don 't need to care who manufactures their
               | transistors._
               | 
               | They might, in an upside-down world where the Shockley
               | Semiconductor board tried to fire Shockley, and where the
               | Traitorous Eight not only didn't bail out but took his
               | side.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Brands can change quickly, but they do matter in the
               | short term. I've witnessed customer support teams use
               | Firefox to say they only supported Internet Explorer and
               | government ministers who thought it was "good" that IE
               | was the "only" web browser, and weirdly a phone company
               | whose customer support person thought their SIM cards
               | worked better on Android than iPhone and that their web
               | chat wouldn't work with a Mac even though they were
               | talking to me on a Mac at the time.
               | 
               | And when I was a kid, it seemed like all the teachers
               | thought it would be a waste of time to learn MacOS
               | because "Apple would be bankrupt soon". (Given how much
               | all the app UIs changed, right decision for the wrong
               | reason).
        
               | ethanbond wrote:
               | All of these examples are end-products. "AI" itself will
               | not be. The winner in AI will be whoever permeates other
               | products/brands most successfully, and end-user brand
               | familiarity doesn't matter much for that. Familiarity
               | among engineering and product leaders is what matters.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Indeed, I'm not disagreeing on that, merely opining that
               | "ChatGPT" as a name could well be relevant for a bit.
        
               | mitjam wrote:
               | Maybe, but maybe AI will become front and center of
               | consumer and productivity IT products and their premier
               | brand ambassadors will be anthropomorphized AI agents.
               | Hello Clippy, this time for real.
        
               | bhouston wrote:
               | Sure that helps with the consumer market, but most people
               | will use AI integrated into other products and not
               | directly.
               | 
               | Those integrated AI solutions will usually be done via
               | enterprise deals where brand name is not quite as
               | important. It will be done by people who care about cost,
               | reliability and ease of use.
               | 
               | Think of nginx's dominance in web servers even though it
               | has no name recognition among the general population. Or
               | Stripe's payment system.
        
               | vinay427 wrote:
               | Yes, however it's increasingly likely that the GPT in
               | ChatGPT will not be limited to OpenAI (in the US), so I'm
               | not sure how much ChatGPT will be worth with countless
               | other platforms containing GPT in their names.
               | 
               | https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-
               | opena...
        
               | YetAnotherNick wrote:
               | The thing is that there is almost no lock in in the
               | models. So brand recognition doesn't help much as people
               | look into the benchmarks and price sometime in the
               | future, if not when just starting out.
        
             | behnamoh wrote:
             | > There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry
             | except for pure model performance.
             | 
             | Hard disagree. OpenAI's function calling is something no
             | other commercial model provides, not even Gemini and
             | Mistral Large.
        
               | fzzzy wrote:
               | The mixtral large marketing at the top of hn right now
               | claims json mode and native function calling. I haven't
               | tried it, but that's what they say.
        
               | riquito wrote:
               | Is it different from
               | https://docs.mistral.ai/guides/function-calling/ ?
        
             | jorvi wrote:
             | > There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry
             | except for pure model performance.
             | 
             | Compute?
             | 
             | At least in the short term, it seems like the biggest
             | wallets are going to win by default.
        
             | robrenaud wrote:
             | If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race
             | and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia.
             | Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the
             | essentially the singular company who makes AI computers.
             | 
             | Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he
             | can.
             | 
             | Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug
             | into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of
             | burn out.
             | 
             | Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to
             | original content creators, approximately solve the content
             | ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the
             | rev share in proportion to their data importance to the
             | model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that
             | their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and
             | encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their
             | content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions
             | against LLM firms.
             | 
             | Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an
             | intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must
             | not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data
             | from poisoned models. With the content creators united
             | behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be
             | destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from
             | poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from
             | a clean room with no copyrighted data.
        
               | johngossman wrote:
               | > Stop selling GPUs. I'm not sure Wall St. would reward
               | that plan
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Yeah, he seems to have left out the critical middle step
               | ("Gather investors to take $2T company private.")
        
               | Ringz wrote:
               | Sounds like someone has finally asked ChatGPT for a
               | feasible plan to consolidate the AI landscape.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | > Make them start over from a clean room with no
               | copyrighted data.
               | 
               | And when such models become popular[0], all the artists
               | now have no job and no way to get compensation for being
               | unable to work through no fault of their own.
               | 
               | I don't think that's really a winning condition. It might
               | make you feel better about the world, but the end result
               | is still all the artists being out of work.
               | 
               | [0] some models are already trained that way, although I
               | assume you're using the word "copyrighted" in the
               | conventional sense of "neither public domain nor an open
               | license", as e.g. all my MIT licensed stuff is still
               | copyrighted but it's fine to use.
        
               | robrenaud wrote:
               | In my hypothetical future, at least the people who create
               | the content used to train the models can get "training
               | royalties", which they aren't getting now.
               | 
               | There is still also money to be made in producing
               | physical art or performances, even when AI can produce
               | amazing digital works.
        
               | bhouston wrote:
               | >If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI
               | race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick
               | Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and
               | Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes
               | AI computers.
               | 
               | I've thought the same thing. NVIDIA getting into AI
               | seriously is a vertical integration play and they often
               | do that -- like NVIDIA trying to buy ARM.
        
               | codexon wrote:
               | If google benchmarks are to be believed, gemini 1.5 will
               | be better than gpt and they use their own chips (Google
               | TPU), no nvidia involved. There is also Groq. I don't see
               | Nvidia keeping their lead and profit margins forever.
        
               | SunlitCat wrote:
               | >Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug
               | into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate
               | of burn out.
               | 
               | Well, they didn't stop selling GPU when cryptomining was
               | going strong. Instead they continued to sell them (with a
               | hefty markup, tho).
               | 
               | It's like selling shovels and picks during a gold rush.
        
             | ben_w wrote:
             | Eh, all this talk of "moats" etc. feels weird when just a
             | few years ago it seemed like everyone was complaining
             | they'd rearranged their corporate structure to include a
             | fully-owned profit-making subsidiary to attract
             | investments, and _all the loud voices_ seemed to think a
             | cap of x100 return on investment was so large it was
             | unlikely to be reached.
             | 
             | And then OpenAI tripped and fell over a magic money
             | printing factory, and the complaints are now in the set
             | ["it's just a stochastic parrot", "it's so good it's a
             | professional threat to $category", "they've lobotomised
             | it", "they don't have a moat", "they're too expensive"].
             | 
             | As the saying goes, "Prediction is very difficult,
             | especially if it's about the future!"
        
           | iambateman wrote:
           | I suppose they didn't but Microsoft has a $3T market cap and
           | OpenAI is theoretically valued at $80B.
           | 
           | OpenAI has 700 people, Microsoft has 220,000 people.
           | 
           | OpenAI is strong but they're still dependent on MSFT.
        
             | cuckatoo wrote:
             | MSFT needs companies like OpenAI to give Azure credits to
             | for their valuation to continue soaring. The deferred
             | revenue on their balance sheet from the unspent Azure
             | credits they give as investment are worth much more to
             | their market cap than $80B.
        
               | jart wrote:
               | It sounds like they took the Federal Reserve's business
               | model and applied it to computing.
        
           | yellow_postit wrote:
           | OpenAI will want to expand to all clouds to increase TAM.
           | 
           | Microsoft will want to avoid things regulators in the current
           | regime will go after.
           | 
           | This seems like a step towards both and ultimately good for
           | developers as it seems likely to bring costs down by
           | increasing competition.
        
         | bookaway wrote:
         | It's also a good play to try to take resources away from local,
         | self-hosted "Feasible AI" solutions. With compute resources, I
         | think Microsoft hopes Mistral skews their focus and resources
         | towards large models that can run only run in the cloud, trying
         | to lure them away with the bait: "Don't you want to build the
         | best AI possible, independent of compute?"
         | 
         | I'd be surprised if they didn't consider the notion that they
         | are hitting to birds with one stone: OpenAI and Indie AI.
        
           | dhruvdh wrote:
           | It's not like Microsoft is working on "Windows AI Studio"
           | [1], or released Orca, or Phi. It's not like there's any talk
           | of AI PCs with mandatory TOPs requirements for Windows 12.
           | Big bad Microsoft coming for your local AI, beware.
           | 
           | [1] https://github.com/microsoft/windows-ai-studio
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | You're downvoted for the snarky tone I guess, but you're
             | absolutely right
        
               | peteradio wrote:
               | Even easier to rug pull your own teams project than
               | someone else's.
        
           | smoldesu wrote:
           | I don't see why Mistral would acquiesce. Like the other
           | comment says, Microsoft has a _lot_ of chips on the table for
           | local AI. They didn 't even mention DirectML, ONNX or
           | Microsoft's other local AI frameworks - suffice to say
           | Microsoft _does_ care about on-device AI.
           | 
           | So... would Mistral deliberately sabotage their low-end
           | models to appease Microsoft's cloud demand? I don't think so.
           | Microsoft probably knows that letting Mistral fall behind
           | would devalue their investment. It makes more sense to
           | bolster the small models to increase demand for the larger
           | ones, at least from where I'm standing.
        
           | teh_infallible wrote:
           | So.. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?
        
           | isoprophlex wrote:
           | Moving straight from Embrace to Extinguish, why not!
        
           | loceng wrote:
           | From my understanding, which may be wrong, you only need the
           | massive compute resources initially to create a compiled
           | vector space LLM - and then that LLM once compiled can be run
           | locally?
           | 
           | This is why anti-CSAM measures policy is possible so
           | compiled-release LLMs can have certain vector spaces removed
           | before release; but apparently people are creating cracks for
           | these types of locks?
        
         | behnamoh wrote:
         | Satya is known to play 4-D chess. With this deal, MSFT is at
         | least two dimensions ahead of the competition. /jk
        
         | dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
         | The pro is that MS buys more AI hype to pump up their share
         | price.
         | 
         | The con is that MS attracts more attention from regulators.
        
         | bugglebeetle wrote:
         | Yes, it's their tried and true maneuver: embrace, extend,
         | extinguish.
        
           | blackoil wrote:
           | Can we stop having this comment in every Microsoft post. It
           | is like people have no clue what EEE is/was, but if it is MS
           | let's post this.
        
             | bugglebeetle wrote:
             | Uh, sorry, but this seems pretty consistent with trying to
             | co-opt and kill open source AI competition:
             | 
             | > [EEE] describe its strategy for entering product
             | categories involving widely used standards, extending those
             | standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using
             | those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its
             | competitors.
        
               | ramon156 wrote:
               | Also I've never heard the term myself
        
         | epolanski wrote:
         | Putting multiple bets and having multiple partnerships is smart
         | regardless of OpenAI drama.
         | 
         | This way Microsoft is less dependent on a single deal and can
         | diversify their offering based on use cases.
        
         | tailspin2019 wrote:
         | > This is just a smart move by Satya Nadella
         | 
         | Diversifying their AI bets definitely makes total sense. If
         | this wasn't their strategy originally, it almost certainly
         | became so the moment the OpenAI board fired Sam Altman.
         | 
         | It's easy to make simplistic judgements from the outside, but
         | with the limited information we have, it does seem like Satya
         | Nadella came out of this OpenAI debacle looking pretty
         | competent.
         | 
         | It's hard to reconcile the fact that the Microsoft that handled
         | the unexpected OpenAI issue so well is the same Microsoft that
         | seems intent on literally setting fire to their flagship
         | product! (Windows)
        
         | kernal wrote:
         | A smart move by Microsoft is to not be reliant on another
         | company for their AI needs.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | Interesting that microsoft is hedging their bets across the
       | foundational model spectrum
       | 
       | >Microsoft will also take a minor stake in the 10-month-old
       | Paris-based company, although the financial details have not been
       | disclosed.
        
         | KuriousCat wrote:
         | Is there an alternative for them?
        
       | jklinger410 wrote:
       | Archive link: https://archive.is/ouoE5
        
         | ShamelessC wrote:
         | Anyone else having issues loading that link?
        
           | nyoomboom wrote:
           | Archive itself has issues for me
        
           | jakub_g wrote:
           | archive.is is known not to work with Cloudflare DNS (google
           | it for details).
        
         | TaurenHunter wrote:
         | For some reason that doesn't work for me - it just times out.
         | 
         | Google cache did:
         | https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
        
           | jacooper wrote:
           | A far better experience than the crappy archive links
        
       | neel8986 wrote:
       | At this point OpenAI should definitely think of some sort of
       | partership with AWS and GCP. Otherwise they will be just one of
       | the few models
        
         | hef19898 wrote:
         | Honest question from someone who never touched one of those
         | models, is OpenAI anything else than the first and most hyped
         | model developer?
        
           | IanCal wrote:
           | IME nothing is as good out of the box as gpt4 for many tasks.
        
             | JackFr wrote:
             | Is gpt4 as good in non-English uses? It's not clear to me
             | that it would be particularly important or advantageous,
             | but does Mistral being based in Europe and polyglot first
             | make it interesting vs. gpt4 in some dimension?
        
               | Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
               | I guess it might depend on language, but as a Spanish
               | speaker who sometimes uses LLMs in Spanish, I'd say the
               | gap between GPT-4 and most of the competition (Mistral
               | included) is actually _larger_ in Spanish than in
               | English.
        
               | barrell wrote:
               | In my experience it's not such a simple question. If you
               | want to be able to speak in nuanced non-English and have
               | it pick up on the intricacies, or have it respond in rich
               | correct non-English, then it's not the best model (Cohere
               | recently released an aya model that I would recommend
               | checking out if this is your use case).
               | 
               | If you want to be able to give basic commands and have
               | the model reason about the logic behind your commands,
               | gpt 4 is still the best, even in minority languages.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | gpt4 is going to better than other models in every
               | language except maybe chinese
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | Depends on the task. Gpt 4 isn't necessarily better at
               | _translation_ than Claude. I 'm aware of no benchmarks on
               | this.
        
               | TwentyPosts wrote:
               | From what I heard Gemini might be better at translation
               | tasks than GPT4.
        
               | moffkalast wrote:
               | It's the best multilingual model out there and it's not
               | even close.
               | 
               | Especially in terms of open models Mistral's are the most
               | multilingual but outside a few handpicked ones the level
               | of proficiency is just too poor for any real usage.
        
             | wing-_-nuts wrote:
             | I don't disagree with you, but an open source model fine
             | tuned for your use case, and embedded with your data is
             | probably going to be way better at many companies uses
             | cases than GPT4 is.
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | Yes, GPT-4 still rules, downside is it's expensive and
           | relatively slow.
        
         | bhouston wrote:
         | I personally didn't realize how fast other models would catch
         | up to OpenAI.
         | 
         | There is a whole set of models now (and some like Meta are
         | purposely trying to undermine OpenAI competitive advantage via
         | open source models) and they are relatively interchangeable
         | with nearly no lock-in.
         | 
         | OpenAI's main advantage is being first to market and having the
         | strongest model (GPT 4), and maybe they can continue to run
         | ahead faster than everyone else, but pure technical leadership
         | is hard to maintain, especially with so many competitors
         | entering.
        
           | behnamoh wrote:
           | > I personally didn't realize how fast other models would
           | catch up to OpenAI.
           | 
           | They haven't though. Gemini is vaporware and other models are
           | not as good as GPT-4.
        
             | bhouston wrote:
             | Mistral Large is quite close to GPT 4 per the stats from
             | today:
             | 
             | https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/
             | 
             | Now once OpenAI launches GPT 5 well I am sure other models
             | won't look so good, but right now these other models are
             | approaching GPT 4 capabilities.
        
               | parineum wrote:
               | I'm pretty bearish on GPT 5 being better than 4. With how
               | neutered 4 has gotten over time, I'd be surprised if GPT
               | 5 is able to perform better with all the same
               | restrictions that GPT 4 has. GPT 4 is less and less
               | willing to actually accomplish a task for you than it is
               | to tell you how you can do it. It looks more and more
               | like Markov chains every day.
        
               | staticman2 wrote:
               | Did you mean bearish?
        
               | parineum wrote:
               | Yes I did, thanks.
        
             | PunchTornado wrote:
             | I find gemini advanced better than gpt4. it is my go to
             | option now.
        
             | donny2018 wrote:
             | For now. As others have said, there is no technological
             | "moat" in this business that could prevent others from
             | catching up.
             | 
             | Perhaps the best way for Open AI is to become THE
             | established AI services company. AWS is still the leader in
             | cloud computing space, and only has Azure competing,
             | despite the fact that other big companies are also
             | technologically capable of building similar products.
        
               | nicce wrote:
               | > AWS is still the leader in cloud computing space, and
               | only has Azure competing, despite the fact that other big
               | companies are also technologically capable of building
               | similar products.
               | 
               | What happened to GCP? I personally switched away because
               | of the bad experiences.. but is that happening in scale
               | as well. I see it barely mentioned these days.
        
               | kccqzy wrote:
               | GCP is suffering from bad sales strategy and lack of
               | existing enterprise relationships.
        
           | Marlinski wrote:
           | Their main advantage for now is their super clean API. Open
           | source alternative are already on par with GPT-3.5 and 4
           | capabilities, they just don't have as good a package but that
           | could change rather quickly too.
        
             | fakedang wrote:
             | Mistral's API was designed to be practically
             | interchangeable with the OpenAI API.
        
             | generalizations wrote:
             | What open source alternative is on par with GPT4?
        
             | tombert wrote:
             | Is that true? I was running Llamas on my laptop a few days
             | ago, and it was giving measurably worse results than
             | ChatGPT. I think it was the uncensored 13B model, but if
             | you got something that's on par with ChatGPT that I can run
             | on my own hardware I'm pretty interested.
        
               | bhouston wrote:
               | 13B models probably cannot directly compare with ChatGPT
               | 4 which maybe +1T parameters or a 5 way MoE of 200B each
               | - or something like that. So you can not likely run a
               | model competitive with ChatGPT locally in the near term.
        
               | tombert wrote:
               | I have a server with a bunch of PCIe slots and like 4
               | Nvidia GPUs with 24GB of RAM each. What's the best model
               | I can realistically run?
        
               | bhouston wrote:
               | Here are some scorecards:
               | 
               | https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_lead
               | erb...
               | 
               | https://paperswithcode.com/sota/sentence-completion-on-
               | hella...
               | 
               | https://paperswithcode.com/sota/common-sense-reasoning-
               | on-wi...
               | 
               | https://paperswithcode.com/sota/common-sense-reasoning-
               | on-ar...
               | 
               | https://paperswithcode.com/sota/common-sense-reasoning-
               | on-co...
        
             | koito17 wrote:
             | > Open source alternative are already on par with GPT-3.5
             | and 4 capabilities
             | 
             | I'm not sure if this is true. With GPT-4, I can
             | successfully ask questions in Japanese and receive
             | responses in (mostly natural) Japanese. I have also found
             | GPT-4 capable of understanding the semantics of prompts
             | with Japanese and English phrases interleaved.
             | 
             | Out of curiosity, I tried doing the same with local models
             | like Mistral 7B and I could never get the model to emit
             | anything other than English. Maybe it's a difference in
             | training data, but even then, GPT-4 has an allegedly small
             | set of training data for non-European languages.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Sure, but it is somewhat disheartening to see GPT 4 still
           | being the king by a clear margin after a full year,
           | especially since it's been nerfed continuously for speed and
           | cost effectiveness.
        
         | changoplatanero wrote:
         | Their problem is that they had to agree on an exclusive
         | relationship with azure in order to secure funding from
         | Microsoft
        
       | rrdharan wrote:
       | I think there's an EU vs US hedge here too, Mistral is likely to
       | be more compliant or at least more favored by EU regulators (see
       | how Spotify's GDPR violation is playing out
       | https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/13/spotify-gdpr-data-access-f...).
        
         | KuriousCat wrote:
         | I would not be surprised if there are more nation level
         | initiatives: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-20/australia-
         | loss-relyin...
        
         | izolate wrote:
         | Not trying to be dismissive of Mistral, but I bet that's a
         | large driving force behind the effort. Usually I'd prefer to
         | focus on the technical aspects, but with the undeniable
         | geopolitical impact of technology/AI, I think it necessitates a
         | discussion.
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | American partnerships with EU companies are subject to a lot
         | more regulatory scrutiny in the EU.
        
       | blitzo wrote:
       | I bet sooner or later Microsoft will be in hot water again with
       | antitrust and this time with generative ai
        
         | krautt wrote:
         | that's a good problem to aspire toward.
        
         | SeanAnderson wrote:
         | How come?
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | You're going to have to give some specific reason why though.
         | 
         | Why this would have anything to do with antitrust is not at all
         | obvious to me. Especially when Google has been inventing and
         | acquiring its own generative AI technology that it is competing
         | with.
        
           | dandy23 wrote:
           | Because MS is everywhere.
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | The OAI stake/deal is already under regulatory review and
           | generally EU is perceived as blocking most large tech mergers
           | since the iRobot intervention.
           | 
           | I suspect we are going to soon see political backlash against
           | regulation in the EU as it is becoming very clear that this
           | is causal to their bad capital markets.
        
             | blackoil wrote:
             | OAI merger?
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | sorry mis-spoke - OAI stake.
        
             | nicce wrote:
             | > I suspect we are going to soon see political backlash
             | against regulation in the EU as it is becoming very clear
             | that this is causal to their bad capital markets.
             | 
             | Who would have thought that human rights are bad for
             | business..
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | What human right do I have to Amazon not owning a vacuum
               | company?
        
               | nicce wrote:
               | Nothing. But you probably don't see one located in
               | Europe, because they would need to allow strikes, there
               | is good level of minimum wage protection in general and
               | strong privacy laws. It is harder to stalk the toilet
               | breaks for employees.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | Median wages in the US are considerably higher than in
               | Europe. Amazon wanted to buy iRobot but was blocked by
               | regulators.
               | 
               | https://www.ft.com/content/db7c6cfc-8ab2-4ee8-a41d-ba20b2
               | 8d4...
        
           | croes wrote:
           | Tight integration of AI into the OS and Office.
           | 
           | What if users want to user other AI services?
           | 
           | It's Internet Explorer and Media Player all over again.
        
         | fzzzy wrote:
         | That's a problem that companies worry about after they have it.
        
         | rapsey wrote:
         | FTC is pretty useless lately.
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | [dupe]
       | 
       | Official MS post: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ai-
       | machine-learning-b...
       | 
       | Official Mistral post: https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/
       | 
       | More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39511477
        
         | moralestapia wrote:
         | Not a dupe, that one is about the LLM release, this one is
         | about the MS-Mistral deal.
        
           | ChrisArchitect wrote:
           | Not only does the official Mistral post have a whole section
           | on the deal, it links out further to MS's official post on
           | the deal also. It's all the same discussion
        
       | moralestapia wrote:
       | Smart move by Satya, to fund both sides of the war.
        
       | neutralino1 wrote:
       | Satya is buying popcorn.
        
       | stall84 wrote:
       | Hey when articles are paywalled like this.. What do most of you
       | guys/gals do ? Just comment on the headline?
        
         | be_erik wrote:
         | Using an archive link, normally works: https://archive.is/ouoE5
        
         | overvale wrote:
         | https://archive.ph/ouoE5
        
         | weberer wrote:
         | I automatically hit Ctrl+F and search for any comments
         | mentioning "archive". Someone usually posts one within 5
         | minutes.
        
         | euniceee3 wrote:
         | Assume the content is trash and then read the comments for the
         | recap. Like anything that is relevant will get quoted.
        
       | cuckatoo wrote:
       | This is just another play to give out more Azure credits to
       | anyone that can feasibly consume them. Azure credits show up as
       | unearned revenue on their SEC filings where they state that they
       | "expect to recognize approximately 45% of this revenue over the
       | next 12 months and the remainder thereafter".
       | 
       | It's wild that you can give out gift cards that make your
       | company's value go up so much more than the gift cards could ever
       | cost you. It's almost like one of those financial schemes that
       | end badly.
        
       | boiler_up800 wrote:
       | Just from experience in the cloud industry, Microsoft is really
       | successful within Europe, potentially more so than in America. I
       | think this partnership will be really successful.
        
       | ametrau wrote:
       | Embrace < you are here
        
       | skadamat wrote:
       | Brilliant move by Microsoft. You want to be the one selling
       | shovels during a gold rush, as they say?
        
         | whimsicalism wrote:
         | nvidia is the shovel seller
        
           | wing-_-nuts wrote:
           | quibble, but nvidia is the shovel _maker_. LLMs require a lot
           | of vram but the underlying hardware requirements are actually
           | fairly simple. There are already efforts in place to create
           | inference specific ASICs.
           | 
           | That'll absolutely eat into Nvidia's profit margins.
        
             | skadamat wrote:
             | Yeah computation has more layers and sellers, it's not a
             | perfect analogy but good enough I feel
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | Clever move, Microsoft have been placing ever puzzle piece
       | correctly so far
        
       | ranman wrote:
       | Is this why AWS had this announcement on Friday?
       | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mistral-ai-models-coming-so...
        
       | AISnakeOil wrote:
       | Mistral is really fantastic compared to other local LLMs. Even
       | the 7B model is very usable on an older GPU.
       | 
       | Excited to see how things go from here in the open-source space.
        
       | yogorenapan wrote:
       | It's concerning that the new model isn't on Huggingface. I hope
       | Microsoft doesn't stop it from open sourcing the models and code.
        
         | unnouinceput wrote:
         | Good luck with that wish bro. Microsoft is all about money and
         | there is no money in open source for them.
        
           | MH15 wrote:
           | VSCode? Typescript?
        
             | sublimefire wrote:
             | And how exactly this earns money for them? embrace extend
             | extinguish
        
             | jacooper wrote:
             | Vscode is a bad example, almost all useful Plugins are
             | closed source on purpose, the package they ship also
             | includes modifications that aren't open either.
        
         | BirbSingularity wrote:
         | Mistral has already scrubbed their commitment to open source
         | from their website, doesn't look good.
        
       | yoyojojofosho wrote:
       | Microsoft Azure blog post on Mistral partnership:
       | https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-mistral...
        
       | finnjohnsen2 wrote:
       | It is the easiest to assume the worst for sure, but Microsoft is
       | not the same as the Bill Gates era so Im gonna be a cautious
       | optimist on this one. Lets hope it is to promote Azure, and they
       | dont push the OpenAI route when it comes too openess. Which is
       | closed and a big loss for the world and a disappointment
        
         | tombert wrote:
         | They're not the same, but they're still a for-profit company.
         | 
         | 90's era Microsoft wasn't evil for the sake of being evil; they
         | were evil because they felt that monopolistic practices were
         | the easiest way to increase their share price. They have a
         | responsibility to their shareholders to try and maximize their
         | share price and so it's hardly unsurprising that they did the
         | infamous Embrace Extend Extinguish, and until regulators
         | stepped in, such practices worked pretty well.
         | 
         | Most companies don't get large enough to form any kind of real
         | monopoly, so it's easy to get on a high-horse. It's also easy
         | to act like it was just a product of "those people", but I
         | fundamentally think that it's a natural consequence of a
         | company that has achieved nearly-total market dominance.
         | 
         | I have very little faith that a multi-trillion-dollar company
         | is going to prioritize what's best for the world.
         | Fundamentally, I think that if they feel they can get away with
         | it, they'll revert to monopolistic tendencies and try and
         | increase share price.
         | 
         | I'm not just picking on Microsoft here either; replace them
         | with basically any other near-monopoly in tech and my
         | criticisms still hold.
        
           | finnjohnsen2 wrote:
           | > 90's era Microsoft wasn't evil for the sake of being evil
           | 
           | You are to forgiving. I don't care too much about the why
           | behind the evil in the software business and this is probably
           | why my rants fall under Godwin's law too often. I won't this
           | time.
           | 
           | > They have a responsibility to their shareholders to try and
           | maximize their share price
           | 
           | ... but I was damn close.
           | 
           | I agree with your whole point about Microsoft. But I don't
           | think it's the same company anymore, I like some of the
           | recent stuff, and I trust their lack of monopoly on the web.
           | For now.
        
             | exe34 wrote:
             | > You are to forgiving
             | 
             | I think the point is that companies aren't good or evil,
             | they are amoral non-aligned super intelligences that
             | maximise shareholder profits.
        
         | joe_the_user wrote:
         | The ads I see on Windows desktop machines (and shenanigans with
         | nonstandard Html extensions and browser defaults and etc...)
         | tell me Microsoft is just as eager to leverage it's monopoly
         | status as ever.
         | 
         | No doubt the company is cautious about some things now but even
         | in these, it will push the boundaries.
        
           | huytersd wrote:
           | Those ads on the login screen are so cheap, wonder why they
           | would do that.
        
         | BirbSingularity wrote:
         | They already have removed their commitment to open-source. It's
         | not looking good.
        
         | downrightmike wrote:
         | MSFT just doesn't say the quiet part out loud these days
        
       | jonplackett wrote:
       | Clever move.
       | 
       | Thinking about it, Google or Apple should have got in there with
       | Mistral.
        
       | philoinvestor wrote:
       | I don't see how this "AI rush" isn't going to skew markets, skew
       | the financials of big tech and create a bubble in the space.
        
         | gitfan86 wrote:
         | There is a bubble in the valuations of LLMs similar to the
         | valuation of NFTs. Anyone can create a modified version of
         | Llama2.
        
           | ctrw wrote:
           | Yes and each of those costs between half a million in pure
           | compute to a few hundred million for fine tuning/training.
        
           | thethimble wrote:
           | The last All in Podcast had an interesting take on this:
           | 
           | Most of the R&D and Capex going into LLMs/GenAI is
           | speculative. The investments haven't translated into real
           | revenue yet. The expectation is that there will be a large
           | pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven't seen
           | the killer apps to substantiate this. This makes for a
           | perfect bubble if the promise doesn't pan out.
           | 
           | Relatedly Nvidia's revenue - as impressive as the recent
           | growth has been - is fully exposed to this risk.
           | 
           | Of course it's possible (likely?) that there will be major
           | wins from this tech, but the fact that there isn't definitive
           | proof (in the form of revenue) yet represents real risk.
        
             | andai wrote:
             | Well, the major win will be when AI makes human labor
             | uneconomical. Not sure what that's going to do to the stock
             | prices though...
        
             | pantulis wrote:
             | > The expectation is that there will be a large pot of
             | revenue at the end of the road, but we haven't seen the
             | killer apps to substantiate this
             | 
             | Imho, unlike crypto and NFT, AI is not a solution in search
             | of a problem. While there is a lot of hand waving, it is
             | not very adventurous to predict that there will be
             | significant productivity gains by adding AI on top of
             | current business processes. Thus the killer apps will be...
             | the same apps we are using today with a touch of AI magic
             | dust.
        
               | mnky9800n wrote:
               | Also, outside of making chatbots and waifus there's a lot
               | of hard tech problems waiting for ai type solutions.
        
             | JumpCrisscross wrote:
             | > _All in Podcast_
             | 
             | Calacanis and Palihapitiya are the Jim Kramers of tech.
        
             | chasd00 wrote:
             | that's the root of my skepticism. I've yet to see huge
             | transformational projects involving AI from the grapevine
             | of my 750k+ employee consulting firm, all I hear about are
             | experiments, webinars, and POCs. What I see in the news
             | regarding the few projects live is not good, AirCanada and
             | some others where the AI went wrong and now the company has
             | to backtrack.
             | 
             | There's no doubt the tech community is all excited because
             | genai, indeed, helps write code but I've yet to hear a
             | large company like Coca Cola announce large AI
             | transformation projects the way they announced large cloud
             | transformation projects a few years ago.
             | 
             | I get more and more on the AI bandwagon as time goes on but
             | I still have a pretty healthy skepticism on how deep and
             | wide the tech will penetrate day to day business at
             | enterprises and that's where the ROI is.
        
           | codexon wrote:
           | The open source models are VERY far behind gpt4.
        
         | tmpz22 wrote:
         | Theres a lot of not-great software that can have bites taken
         | out of it by LLM advancements and most of the incumbents are
         | going to pay into it because they just can't compete in the AI
         | field.
         | 
         | Can LLMs become reliable enough at transforming data that it
         | can replace or augment the current slew of ETL tools? Can it
         | produce visualizations better then current BI tools? Can
         | copilot compete with a junior developer? Im not sure, but at
         | this point Im willing to say 50/50 which is worth the bet.
        
         | esics6A wrote:
         | This is a bubble and one that will burst very hard. AI is the
         | perfect technology for this. It's opaque and most investors
         | (who barely understand tech in general) have no clue what it
         | really does or how it works. This is the closest we've ever had
         | to multiple large respected tech companies selling "snake oil"
         | a cure all. The capabilities of AI they mention as if they're
         | available today are literally many decades and generations
         | away. Automating information workers, creatives and engineers
         | will take AGI that's simply impossible with our technology.
         | 
         | When the AI bubble bursts I wouldn't be surprised if takes down
         | major tech companies with it.
        
           | jstummbillig wrote:
           | Can you be specific about what the bubble is?
           | 
           | I am getting 100x value out of my 30 chatgpt bucks. I am
           | doing things that I could not have done pre-gpt4, being more
           | productive by a factor of, idk, 1.25 maybe.
           | 
           | It's quite simply the largest/simplest productivity
           | improvement in my life, so far. Given it's only going to get
           | better, unless they are underpricing the service by a
           | _enormous_ margin (as in: defrauding shareholders margin) I
           | have a hard time understanding what shape the bubble could
           | possibly have.
        
             | Judgmentality wrote:
             | Do any AI companies actually turn a profit? I feel like the
             | only real winner is Nvidia because they are selling shovels
             | to the gold diggers, while all the gold diggers are trying
             | to outspend each other without a business model that has
             | any consideration for unit economics.
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | I love a prudent take on company money - but given how
               | investing works and how young this entire thing is and
               | the (to me) absolutely real value, I find it hard to be
               | very worried about that part right now.
               | 
               | I can literally run a ballpark model on my MB Pro, right
               | now, at marginal additional electrical cost. I will be
               | the first to say that all of this (including GPT4) is
               | still fairly garbage, but I don't know when there was the
               | last time in the history of tech, where less fantasy to
               | get from here to what will be _good_ was required.
        
               | chucke1992 wrote:
               | The thing is that the bigger business giants like MSFT or
               | Amazon are probably profit quite nicely from AI. Smaller
               | companies, not aligned with any big giants - probably
               | not.
        
             | PheonixPharts wrote:
             | You're really generating $3000 per month from ChatGPT? Can
             | you give a hint about what you've built that generates this
             | kind of ROI?
             | 
             | I have only seen people making money in AI by selling AI
             | products/promises to other people who are losing money. The
             | practical uses of these tools still seem to be largely
             | untapped outside of as enhanced search engines. They're
             | great at that, but that does not have a return on value
             | that is in proportion to current investment in this space.
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | > Can you give a hint about what you've built that
               | generates this kind of ROI?
               | 
               | Sure. Absolutely nothing amazing: (Mostly) internal
               | software for a medical business I am currently building.
               | 
               | It's just that the actual cost of hiring someone is even
               | quite a bit higher, than what is printed on the paycheck
               | and the risk attached to anyone leaving on a small team
               | is huge (n=0 and n=1 is an insane difference). GPT4 has
               | bridged the gap between being able to do something and
               | _not_ being able to do something at various points over
               | the past year.
               | 
               | EDIT: And to be clear, while I won't claim "rockstar
               | programmer", I have coded for roughly 20 years, which is
               | the larger part of my life.
        
               | JumpCrisscross wrote:
               | Just spoke to a restaurant group owner in Mexico who was
               | able to eliminate their web developer because he can now
               | ask ChatGPT to draft up a basic website.
               | 
               | The kicker? It couldn't do the interactive menu their old
               | website did, so now clicking menu links to a PDF. Which
               | is always, ALWAYS, better.
        
               | sgu999 wrote:
               | > he can now ask ChatGPT to draft up a basic website.
               | 
               | I'm pretty sure he could have done that with one of the
               | thousands tools like Wix, many years before ChatGPT.
        
               | slices wrote:
               | yes, but which one of thouse thousand, how long would it
               | take to learn how to use it, etc. Still less friction in
               | just asking ChatGPT to do this via the same interface you
               | ask it to do a bunch of other stuff.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | Even just looking at ChatGPT as a better frontend to the
               | Wix help docs, ChatGPT empowered this restaurant owner to
               | do the job themselves, rather than having to have a
               | person do it. Which means that person is out of a job.
               | Good for the restaurant owner, but bad for that person.
               | Which means it's down to personal relationships and how
               | you treat people and all those soft skills that aren't
               | programming.
        
               | phatfish wrote:
               | Pretty sure he still does that. Unless ChatGPT can now
               | test and deploy a website as well as generate text.
        
               | saewitz wrote:
               | It's better with accessibility?
        
               | doug_durham wrote:
               | You are only looking at one dimension. What is your
               | hourly rate based on your salary. If ChatGPT saves you 10
               | hours a month that could easily be over $2000.
        
               | michaelbuckbee wrote:
               | This is just a +1 to the ROI discussion, but I'd say that
               | AI tooling roughly doubles my development productivity.
               | 
               | Some of it's in asking ChatGPT: "Give me the 3 possible
               | ways to implement X?" and getting something back I hadn't
               | considered. A lot of it is in sort of "super code
               | completion".
               | 
               | I use Cursor and the UI is very slick. If I'm stuck on
               | something (like a method that's not working) I can
               | highlight it and hit Cmd+L and it will explain the code
               | and then suggest how to fix it.
               | 
               | Hit Cmd+K and it will write out the code for you. Also,
               | gotten a lot of mileage out of writing out a rough
               | version of something in a language I know and then
               | getting the AI to turn that into something else (ex: Ruby
               | to Lua).
        
             | spiderice wrote:
             | I'm really curious what is making you so much more
             | productive. My experience with AI has largely been the
             | opposite. Also curious how you're using AI to make $3,000
             | per month more than you would without it.
        
               | choilive wrote:
               | It's not that he is making $3k a month, he gaining the
               | equivalent productive value of of $3k.
        
               | aquova wrote:
               | I feel the same way. I think LLMs are neat, and I find
               | them interesting from a technical standpoint, but I have
               | yet to have them do anything for me that's more than just
               | a novelty. Even things like Copilot, which I'll admit has
               | impressed me a bit, doesn't feel like it would radically
               | change my life, even if it was completely foolproof.
        
             | wing-_-nuts wrote:
             | I get that there are limitations with LLMs, but I _don 't_
             | understand people saying it has no value, just because it
             | occasionally hallucinates. Over the past week I've used
             | chatGpt to code not one, but two things that were
             | _completely_ beyond my knowledge (an auto delete js
             | snippet, and a gnome extension that turns my dock red if my
             | vpn turns off). These are just two examples. I 've also
             | used it to write a handy regex and write a better bash
             | script.
             | 
             | LLMs are insanely helpful if you use them with their
             | limitations in mind.
        
               | aleph_minus_one wrote:
               | > LLMs are insanely helpful if you use them with their
               | limitations in mind.
               | 
               | This depends on your use case. I can honestly tell that
               | all the chat bot AIs don't "get" my kind of thinking
               | about mathematics and programming.
               | 
               | Since some friend who is graduate student in computer
               | science did not believe in my judgement, I verbally
               | presented him some test prompts for programming task
               | where I wanted the AI to help me (these are not the most
               | representative ones for my kind of thinking, but are
               | prompts for which it is rather easy to decide whether the
               | AI is helpful or not).
               | 
               | He had to agree from the description alone that the AIs
               | will have difficulties with these task, despite the fact
               | that these are common, and very well-defined programming
               | problems. He opined that these tasks are simply too
               | complex for the existing AIs, and suggested that if I
               | split these tasks into much smaller subtasks, the AI
               | might be helpful. Let me put it this way: I personally
               | doubt that if I stated the subtasks in a way in which I
               | would organize the respective programs, the AI would be
               | of help. :-)
               | 
               | What was just important for me was to able to convince
               | the my counterpart that whether AIs are helpful or not
               | for programming depends a lot on your kind of thinking
               | about programming and your programming style. :-)
        
               | wing-_-nuts wrote:
               | I would say that the ability to break a problem down into
               | manageable chunks is the mark of a sr dev. I think of
               | chatGpt as a jr that's read _a lot_ but understands only
               | a little. To crib Kurtzwell you gotta  'run _with_ the
               | machine '
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | What did happen when you split the question into
               | subtasks? What were those questions?
        
               | mewpmewp2 wrote:
               | Any chance you could share the prompt?
               | 
               | I on the otherhand feel like I am completely in sync with
               | Copilot and ChatGPT. It is as if it always knows what I
               | am thinking.
        
               | nuancebydefault wrote:
               | This is a rather long post, I'm genuinely curious why you
               | did not describe the problem that you want to solve. Is
               | it too complex for even humans to understand?
        
               | chasd00 wrote:
               | > LLMs are insanely helpful if you use them with their
               | limitations in mind.
               | 
               | the fact that LLM responses can't be add supported (yet)
               | make them much more valuable than internet search IMO.
               | You have to pay for chatgpt because there's no ads. No
               | ads no constant manipulation of content and your search
               | to get more ads in front of you.
               | 
               | Having to pay for using genai is it's best selling point
               | ironically.
        
             | rchaud wrote:
             | The bubble is that every $1 in capital going to
             | OpenAI/Nvidia is a $1 that cannot be invested anywhere
             | else: Healthcare, Automotive, Education, etc. Of course OAI
             | and Nvidia will invest those funds, but in areas beneficial
             | purely to them. Meta has lost $20bn trying to make Horizon
             | Worlds a success, and appears to have abandoned it.
             | 
             | Even government-led industrialization efforts in socialist
             | economies led to actual products, like the production of
             | the Yagan automobile in Chile in the 1970s[0].
             | 
             | We've already had a decade plus of sovereign wealth funds
             | sinking tens of billions into Uber and autonomous driving.
             | We still don't have those types of cars on the road and
             | it's questionable whether self driving will even generate
             | the economic growth multiplier that its investment levels
             | should merit.
             | 
             | [0] https://journal.hkw.de/en/erinnerungen-an-den-yagan-
             | allendes...
        
               | DANmode wrote:
               | As well as the artificially increased valuations for
               | every company with the .ai TLD for their landing page.
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | Fair enough. I personally would have a hard time spotting
               | an outsized lost opportunity value with confidence, if it
               | existed.
               | 
               | It feels, though, that this argument could (maybe a be
               | little _too_ easily) be applied to any new industry
               | sector, in horse-vs-car fashion.
        
               | polski-g wrote:
               | When Meta "lost" 20bn, they actually spent it on salary.
               | The employees then go out and buy things like the Tesla
               | Automobile, an actual product.
        
               | acdha wrote:
               | This sounds like the broken window fallacy. You could use
               | the same logic to suggest that Meta dump piles of cash on
               | the sidewalk in front of their office - it'd circulate
               | but it wouldn't help them.
        
               | rchaud wrote:
               | If the same $20bn was spent on fixing a bridge, people
               | would spend those wages to boost economic activity AND
               | have a fixed bridge that will improve output even more.
               | Horizon Worlds isn't a productive use of capital in that
               | regard.
               | 
               | It'd be one thing if they open-sourced their VR tech,
               | some of that could lead to productive tech down the line,
               | but as a private company, they're not obliged to do any
               | of that.
        
             | nozzlegear wrote:
             | Last night I asked ChatGPT 4 to help me write a quick bash
             | script to find and replace a set of 20 strings across some
             | liquid files with a set of 20 other strings. The strings
             | were hardcoded, it knew exactly what they were in no
             | unclear terms. I just wanted it to whip up a script that
             | would use ripgrep and sed to find and replace.
             | 
             | First, it gave me a bash script that looked pretty much
             | exactly like what I wanted at first glance. I looked if
             | over, verified it even used sed correctly for macOS like I
             | told it, and then tried to run it. No dice:
             | replace.sh: line 5:
             | designer_option_calendar.start_month.label: syntax error:
             | invalid arithmetic operator (error token is
             | ".start_month.label")
             | 
             | Not wanting to fix the 20 lines myself, I fed the error
             | back to ChatGPT. It spun me some bullshit about the problem
             | being the "declaration of [my] associative array, likely
             | because bash tries to parse elements within the array that
             | aren't properly quoted or when it misinterprets special
             | characters."
             | 
             | It then spat out a "fixed" version of the script that was
             | exactly the same, it just changed the name of the variable.
             | Of course, that didn't work so I switched tactics and asked
             | it to write a python script to do what I wanted. The python
             | script was more successful, but the first time it left off
             | half of the strings I wanted it to replace, so I had to ask
             | it to do it again and this time "please make sure you
             | include all of the strings that we originally discussed."
             | 
             | Another short AI example, this time featuring Mistral's
             | open source model on Ollama. I'd been interested in a
             | script that uses AI to interpret natural language and turn
             | it into timespans. Asking Mistral "if it's currently 20:35,
             | how much time remains until 08:00 tomorrow morning" had the
             | model return its typical slew of nonsense and the answer of
             | "13.xx hours". This is obviously incorrect, though funnily
             | enough when I plugged its answer into ChatGPT and asked it
             | how it thought Mistral may have come to that answer, it
             | understood that Mistral did _not_ understand midnight on a
             | 24 hour clock.
             | 
             | These are just some of my recent issues with AI in the past
             | week. I don't trust it for programming tasks especially --
             | it gets F# (my main language) consistently wrong.
             | 
             | Don't mistake me though, I do find it genuinely useful for
             | plenty of tasks, but I don't think the parent commenter is
             | wrong calling it snake oil either. Big tech sells it as a
             | miracle cure to everything, the magic robot that can solve
             | all problems if you can just tell it what the problem is.
             | In my experience, it has big pitfalls.
        
               | codexon wrote:
               | I have the same experience. Every time I try to have it
               | code something that isn't completely trivial or all over
               | the internet like quicksort, it always has bugs and
               | invents calls to functions that don't exist. And yes, I'm
               | using GPT-4, the best model available.
               | 
               | And I'm not even asking about an exotic language like F#,
               | I'm asking it questions about C++ or Python.
               | 
               | People are out there claiming that GPT is doing all their
               | coding for them. I just don't see how, unless they simply
               | did not know how to program at all.
               | 
               | I feel like I'm either crazy, or all these people are
               | lying.
        
               | throwawayanothe wrote:
               | Same experience here
        
               | nkozyra wrote:
               | > I feel like I'm either crazy, or all these people are
               | lying.
               | 
               | With some careful prompting I've been able to get some
               | decent code that is 95% usable out of the box. If that
               | saves me time and changes my role there into code review
               | versus dev + code review, that's a win.
               | 
               | If you just ask GPT4 to write a program and don't give it
               | fairly specific guardrails I agree it spits out nearly
               | junk.
        
               | taco-hands wrote:
               | > People are out there claiming that GPT is doing all
               | their coding for them. I just don't see how, unless they
               | simply did not know how to program at all.
               | 
               | I doubt it and certainly not for anything beyond basic.
               | I've seen (and tried GPT's for code input a lot) and
               | often they come back with errors or weird
               | implementations.
               | 
               | I made one request yesterday for a linear regression
               | function (yes, because I was being lazy). So was
               | chatGPT... It spat out a trashy broken function that
               | wasn't even remotely close to working - more along the
               | lines of pseudo code.
               | 
               | I complained saying "WTH, that doesn't even work" and it
               | said "my apologies" and spits out a perfectly working
               | accurate function! Go figure.
               | 
               | Others have turned to testing tips or threats, which is
               | an interesting avenue:
               | https://minimaxir.com/2024/02/chatgpt-tips-analysis/
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | I hear you. It's all pretty bad. I have spent half-days
               | getting accustomed to and dealing with gpt garbage -- but
               | then I have done that plenty of times in my life, with my
               | own garbage and that of co-workers.
               | 
               | On the margins it's getting stuff good enough, often
               | enough, quick enough. But it very much transformed my
               | coding experience from slow deliberation to a rocket
               | ride: Things will explode and often. Not loving that
               | part, but there's a reason we still have rockets.
        
             | outside1234 wrote:
             | There is very clear value in LLMs
             | 
             | The bubble is that it is not clear there is a $XXXB
             | business in building or hosting them.
             | 
             | OpenAI is losing money hand over fist, open source models
             | are becoming available that are on-par and so commoditize
             | the market, etc.
        
             | novaRom wrote:
             | > largest/simplest productivity improvement in my life, so
             | far
             | 
             | many productivity improvements in the last years: Internet
             | Search, Internet Forums, Wikipedia, etc. LLMs and other AI
             | models is continuation of the improvement of information
             | processing.
        
             | philoinvestor wrote:
             | Can I paste links in replies here? I wrote an article about
             | the AI bubble a few weeks ago.
        
             | philoinvestor wrote:
             | You may be getting 100x value out of your 30 bucks.
             | 
             | Is that the only variable that one needs to consider to
             | gauge if this is bubble territory?
        
               | jstummbillig wrote:
               | Other variables is basically what I was asking for, in
               | the first sentence of my comment.
        
               | philoinvestor wrote:
               | How many GPUs are being delivered today and for how long
               | will they be used / what's their life?
               | 
               | Who is funding the purchase of those GPUs?
               | 
               | If VC money then what happens if the startups don't make
               | money?
               | 
               | Are users using AI-apps because they are free and dump
               | them soon?
               | 
               | Isn't their competition in semiconductors? Won't we have
               | chips-as-a-commodity soon? LLMs-as-a-commodity?
               | 
               | Is Big Tech spending all this money to create VALUE or
               | just to survive the next phase of the technological
               | revolution? (e.g. the AI rush)
               | 
               | If prices are high, and sales are high, and competition
               | is still low -- then how much is nvidia actually worth?
               | And if we don't now why is it selling for so many times
               | earnings?
               | 
               | https://www.philoinvestor.com/p/downside-at-nvidia-and-
               | the-n...
        
             | dottjt wrote:
             | It's that "it's only going to get better" part that is
             | driving the bubble, I think.
             | 
             | The market has this idea that over the next year, we're
             | somehow going to have AI that's literally perfect. Yet
             | that's not how technology works, it takes decades to get
             | there.
             | 
             | It'd be like if the first LCD TV was invented, and all of a
             | sudden everyone is expecting 8k OLED by the next year. It
             | just doesn't work like that.
        
               | thatoneguy wrote:
               | Yeah, but this is different because it's largely just
               | money -> more GPUs -> more people looking at the problem
               | -> better results. You can't stumble upon an 8K TV
               | overnight but you can luck upon the right gold mining
               | claim and you can luck upon some new training algorithm
               | that changes the game immediately.
        
           | philoinvestor wrote:
           | I agree that it's opaque and that's why I said that AI can be
           | the ULTIMATE bubble.
        
             | mnky9800n wrote:
             | It's a shame the phrase "black box" exists in machine
             | learning when it could have been "black bubble".
        
           | Spivak wrote:
           | > This is the closest we've ever had to multiple large
           | respected tech companies selling "snake oil" a cure all.
           | 
           | The problem with this take is you can deliver real results.
           | At current $dayjob we do the very dumbest thing which is text
           | -> labels -> feedback -> fine_tune -> text... and surface
           | them as part of our search offering and it's rocketed to the
           | most useful customer feature in less than 6 months of rolling
           | it out. Customers define labels that are meaningful to them,
           | we have a general-purpose AI classify text according to those
           | labels. Our users gleefully (which is shocking given our
           | industry) label text for us (which we just feed into
           | fine_tuning) because of just how fast they can see the
           | results.
           | 
           | Like it's as grug brain as it gets and we bumbled into a
           | feature that's apparently more valuable to our users than the
           | rest of the product combined. Folks want us to sell it as a
           | separate module and we're just hoping they don't realize it's
           | 3 LLMs in a trenchcoat.
        
           | ABS wrote:
           | P/E ratios (so far) say otherwise: all the big tech public
           | companies have reasonable P/E ratios and are investing
           | heavily their profits in contrast to, say, the dotcom bubble
           | when over 40% of the companies had P/E ratios unsustainably
           | over the moon.
           | 
           | Are there a gazillion companies riding the "AI everywhere"
           | wave to raise money? yes, yes there are. Will most of them
           | fail? sure.
           | 
           | But the big players are fine at the moment so there is
           | nothing that can burst very hard (yet) and the difference is
           | in the denominators which are, so far, going up.
           | 
           | Of the top ones only NVIDIA and Amazon have P/E ratios a bit
           | too high and among the top 10 only AMD's is way too high.
        
           | partiallypro wrote:
           | I think there is a bubble, but not in the traditional sense
           | of this all being nonsense. Obviously, AI is going to be a
           | world changer, but I think in a few years many companies are
           | going find, at least for them, that their projects using AI
           | are wildly unprofitable. Good AI is expensive. This could
           | take years to play out, but when Nvidia is trading higher
           | than Microsoft and Apple in total market cap, we'll be well
           | into it. I don't rule that out.
        
           | SunlitCat wrote:
           | It's like the previous craze with blockchain. Everyone and
           | their dog was about to use blockchain to do the most awesome
           | thing ever. And even things that didn't really lend
           | themselves to blockchain were suddenly presented as prime
           | examples of how to use blockchain.
           | 
           | I'm not saying both technologies don't have their uses, but
           | the hype around them is crazy and not healthy.
        
             | philoinvestor wrote:
             | Yep, there are similarities between the blockchain rush and
             | the AI rush.
             | 
             | But in my last piece on AI, I said that AI is 50X
             | Blockchain!
        
           | codexon wrote:
           | This technology is already fully automating copywriters and
           | almost replacing concept artists right now. However it is
           | true that right now the valuations are for something far more
           | than that, and so far it doesn't seem like LLMs will be able
           | to do much more.
           | 
           | I was talking to someone that just retired from a programming
           | position at a FANG and he seems to think that AGI (artificial
           | general intelligence) is only a few years away just based off
           | what he sees with ChatGPT and he's dumping all his money into
           | AI stocks. The level of hype and over-extrapolation is so
           | absurd, and the fact that it can affect someone with a
           | technical background...
           | 
           | It really does seem like a bubble to me.
        
             | ForgotIdAgain wrote:
             | Isn't the role of a concept artist mainly to do
             | worldbuilding and drawing second? AI does not seem to have
             | a good world model, they make pretty pictures but they lack
             | thought behind them.
        
               | codexon wrote:
               | I really don't know the details.
               | 
               | You can see a concept artist here discovering he stopped
               | getting work after a company splurted out that they
               | switched to AI.
               | 
               | https://twitter.com/_Dofresh_/status/1709519000844083290
               | 
               | My guess is that a lot of people can have ideas, so you
               | don't need an artist to bring them to life anymore.
        
               | aquova wrote:
               | Agreed, and I think there are a number of... over-
               | enthusiastic executives with dollar signs in their eyes
               | who are in for a rude awakening about this. It might
               | sound great to replace your artistic staff with an LLM
               | subscription, until you realize that you laid off all the
               | creative vision with them. That isn't to say I think
               | it'll go away though, I wouldn't be surprised if art
               | students in the future are taught how to wrangle LLMs to
               | supplement their own designs.
        
           | curtisblaine wrote:
           | > When the AI bubble bursts I wouldn't be surprised if takes
           | down major tech companies with it.
           | 
           | Hopefully, knock wood. Maybe it will even slow down the
           | genrral enshittification created by those major tech
           | companies.
        
           | d--b wrote:
           | Well that's your view, but we keep seeing incredible progress
           | year on year.
           | 
           | Noone thought beating the game of Go was feasible.
           | 
           | Noone thought self-driving cars would actually work.
           | 
           | Noone predicted ChatGPT. See where we're at now with multi
           | modal models.
           | 
           | And Sora.
           | 
           | The truth is that you can't predict anything anymore about
           | this tech cause all expectations keep being blown away.
           | 
           | AGI may be right there, and that's what's driving the money.
        
             | ArchOversight wrote:
             | > Noone thought self-driving cars would actually work.
             | 
             | Many people thought self driving WOULD work and that we'd
             | be further along than we are now. We have vastly
             | overestimated how far we'd be, and vastly underestimated
             | how much time and effort it would actually take.
             | 
             | Self driving cars as they exist today are still mere toys
             | compared to where the industry thought they were going to
             | be. Look at Cruise, Waymo, Zoox, Uber's ex-self driving car
             | division and others.
             | 
             | We are not anywhere near the self-driving autonomous cars
             | we had hoped for.
        
           | huytersd wrote:
           | Eh I don't know. I find ChatGPT very useful atleast 10 times
           | a day.
        
         | PheonixPharts wrote:
         | I've stopped believing in rational markets a long time ago. For
         | the people behind this funding madness:
         | 
         | > to skew markets, skew the financials of big tech and create a
         | bubble in the space.
         | 
         | Are the _intended_ consequences of this. The people behind the
         | money in AI, just like the people behind the money in crypto,
         | _don 't care_ if there's a reality to all of this, they just
         | care if they can make a lot of money while the music is
         | playing.
         | 
         | I really thought 2022 was going to be the beginning of tech
         | returning to reality, but naively didn't understand that this
         | would entail a lot of people with a lot of money losing money,
         | and that's not going to happen.
         | 
         | As with all bubbles, the interesting thing isn't pointing out
         | there's a bubble, we've been living in many bubbles for decades
         | now. The interesting thing is pointing out what will make it
         | pop. So long as globally money keeps pouring into US markets
         | we'll see this continue.
         | 
         | On the plus side, at least LLMs are a lot of fun to work and
         | play with!
        
           | rchaud wrote:
           | "Efficient markets" deliver normal returns. The people with
           | the most capital to throw at things are trying to create
           | monopolies that can generate supernormal returns.
           | 
           | This is already a highly unstable arrangement, and it's made
           | more dangerous by introducing impurities like artificially
           | suppressed interest rates and SPAC IPOs.
        
           | throwup238 wrote:
           | _> I 've stopped believing in rational markets a long time
           | ago._
           | 
           | It makes a lot more sense if you think of markets as just a
           | bunch of coked out hairless monkeys. Then "rational" becomes
           | a lot more meaningful.
        
           | DANmode wrote:
           | > I've stopped believing in rational markets a long time ago.
           | 
           | Agreed.
           | 
           | Sentiment is everything.
        
           | philoinvestor wrote:
           | With the way NVIDIA is moving and how it's seeding AI
           | startups, you could be right about them actively trying to do
           | this. But there is a reality beyond our ability to predict
           | it..
        
       | asimpleusecase wrote:
       | https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/
       | 
       | In fulfilment of some of the comments in this thread meet mistral
       | Large on Azure
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | With mixture of experts (MoE) models, I would think that Mistral
       | might make a lot of money reselling specific models to big
       | players like Microsoft and Google to augment their MoE systems.
       | 
       | I mostly use either mistral7b or mixtral8-7b for most things, and
       | experiment with other models on the side. In what world will LLMs
       | not become a commodity?
       | 
       | You might answer that question by saying that on player achieves
       | AGI and captures the market, but I think there will be more to
       | AGI than LLMs.
        
         | comeonbro wrote:
         | > With mixture of experts (MoE) models, I would think that
         | Mistral might make a lot of money reselling specific models to
         | big players like Microsoft and Google to augment their MoE
         | systems
         | 
         | I am curious about what you mean by this. There is a (very
         | understandable) common misconception about what "mixture of
         | experts" means in current practice.
         | 
         | Mixtral is not a mixture of fully-separable domain experts,
         | like one is an expert at programming and one is an expert at
         | arts and literature. The "experts" are per-layer (and as far as
         | I know, the subject of their "expertise" not even interpretable
         | at this point).
        
       | hscontinuity wrote:
       | I'm lost here. Can anyone explain why the speculation of risk
       | resounding around a 'bubble' of LLM and other emerging
       | technologies (TinyLM, VLM, ALM, etc) is rounding a bubble?
       | 
       | Meaning, the dot-com bubble showed a misappropriation of revenue
       | by leading technology companies alongside the capital
       | investorship, mainly VC's and private equity. Basically, everyone
       | spent without producing a product; which lead to the mergers
       | still the basis for many of the largest corporations today (and
       | subsequently the 2008 crash, which further merged companies in
       | the aftermath).
       | 
       | So, for me the difference is the money being spent here in this
       | 'bubble' isn't like parking new mall shops on various websites,
       | then spending the capital to entice buyers to purchase (either
       | for store products or the store itself) - rather - it seems to me
       | that both private and public sentiment is that the future is
       | bright with the right application of these tools, in the right
       | systems, to promote applicable use cases for things we (humans)
       | can leave up to code/machines.
       | 
       | For instance, one of the most impressive applications of TinyLM
       | uses is setting up several (or dozens) of tiny sensors in say a
       | greenhouse. Each sensor can be linked to a central data
       | repository for active monitoring to deploy active controls - be
       | it barometric pressure, moisture content (soil, air), etc.
       | Linking a bunch of these devices and letting it automatically
       | run, along with linking this sensors as the data-providers to
       | machines that may in turn plant, cull, trim, essentially a fully
       | automated greenhouse.
       | 
       | I'm not greenthumb and I lack in-depth knowledge around how
       | greenhouses (modern or old) work. However, it's without
       | understanding the details I do understand it still takes a (or
       | more) human to maintain the greenhouse.
       | 
       | Consider making these kinds of greenhouses (as is standard in
       | some places now with vertical in-door growing farms) completely
       | autonomous.
       | 
       | That's pretty technologically feasible it would seem with the
       | newest applications of (quote) AI. And it's likely very
       | profitable as well.
       | 
       | If I were to take the same ideology and apply to other
       | industries, I find several applications like the one I mention
       | that would absolutely change how we (humans) live in this (soon
       | to be, IMHO) post-human industrialized world.
       | 
       | So where is all of the doom and gloom from - monopoly, errant
       | comprehension of the technologies, or simply dogma?
        
       | nojvek wrote:
       | Microsoft knows they won big in Cloud via Azure Big as in 100s of
       | billions.
       | 
       | They know someone is going to win big in AI. They lost big on the
       | mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of Microsoft.
       | 
       | They don't want to lose on AI. Better to hedge your bets.
       | 
       | They have so much money lying around. Better to invest where they
       | think the puck will be.
       | 
       | Yes AI is hyped but I doubt the bubble will burst. Cheap human
       | like intelligence if achieved via AGI is gonna make them 10x more
       | valuable.
       | 
       | Meta is all in, Google is all in, Microsoft is all in.
       | 
       | Tesla is betting they'll be the biggest robotics company on the
       | planet.
       | 
       | Getting to AGI is like getting to first nuke for tech behemoths.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | > They lost big on the mobile OS. It is the biggest blunder of
         | Microsoft.
         | 
         | I've watched Bill Gates tell Andrew Ross Sorkin during an
         | interview "if it wasn't for the FTC investigating us for the
         | anti-trust lawsuit, we wouldn't have been distracted/took our
         | eye off the prize on mobile"
         | 
         | How sure are we Microsoft "has what it takes/had what it took"
         | to deliver a phone + operating system as polished as Apple?
         | 
         | Windows 11 is very much measurably worse than Mac OS Sonoma.
         | Littered with ads, in between old UI + new UI patterns, etc.
         | 
         | That's 2024
         | 
         | I'm not super confident I'd prefer a Microsoft/Windows mobile
         | OS and therefore I'm not super confident they could actually
         | have delivered a good one
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | It doesn't matter if it's any good, it just has to be
           | functional, which Microsoft proved they can do, since windows
           | phones existed. Microsoft has the business side (aka money
           | and patience that Google doesn't) to make it happen. Look at
           | how well Microsoft Teams is doing. Look at Bing, now that
           | it's got ChatGPT behind it.
        
           | quantisan wrote:
           | I had multiple Microsoft Lumia as my primary driver for a
           | couple years. I've been on iPhones for 10+ years total. There
           | were some good (better user interface) and bad (Live logins
           | required in random places) with Windows Mobile. Like Windows,
           | they have pockets of good ideas fractured by their lack of
           | cohesion.
        
           | mattmaroon wrote:
           | I think Windows Mobile could have been better than Android.
           | In fact, at one point it debatably was. Personally I think
           | Windows is considerably more usable than OSX (yeah I know
           | that's going to offend people and raise a near-religious
           | argument) and while I won't say Microsoft's hardware is or
           | ever was as good as Apple's, I think they are far better at
           | UI/UX and hardware than Google. Actually I think they're
           | better at almost everything than Google.
           | 
           | They could have easily been where Android is now if they were
           | two years faster. I think we'd just have a different duopoly
           | and iPhone would still be basically where it is today.
        
             | blagie wrote:
             | > I won't say Microsoft's hardware is or ever was as good
             | as Apple's, I think they are far better at UI/UX and
             | hardware than Google.
             | 
             | Microsoft-proper hardware is crap, even compared to high-
             | end Google. However, that doesn't matter. My Thinkpad eats
             | Apple hardware for breakfast (as well as anything from
             | Google or Microsoft). Dell has a few nicer laptops in the
             | Precision line which do almost as well as Thinkpad, and
             | definitely better than Apple / Google / Microsoft.
             | 
             | It's the ecosystem.
             | 
             | > Actually I think they're better at almost everything than
             | Google.
             | 
             | I'd agree, except:
             | 
             | - Hardware
             | 
             | - Office 365 typing synchronization
             | 
             | Google Pixel Pro is quite good (as are most top-of-the-line
             | Google phones), as was the Chromebook Pixel (their top-of-
             | the-line Chromebook, when they made it).
        
           | AlienRobot wrote:
           | I find this ironic because you could say many of the problems
           | with modern Windows (& Linux) GUI stem from distancing the
           | design from the traditional desktop paradigm and seeking to
           | mobile-fy everything, specially with large click targets.
        
           | blagie wrote:
           | Microsoft has gotten pretty good at software development.
           | Satya Nadella has been doing a surprisingly good job
           | reforming everything about the company.
           | 
           | That doesn't mean Windows wasn't absolute dogs--t for many
           | years and isn't riddled with a pile of technical debt. Apple,
           | in contrast, started with NeXTStep. I agree about the
           | specifics you mention (built-in ads and spyware), but the
           | core problems with Windows predate modern Microsoft, and
           | can't really big fixed.
           | 
           | If, in 2024, Microsoft decided to invest in building a real
           | mobile OS, I think they could do okay. The bigger problem
           | would be lack of app ecosystem, and the chicken-and-egg
           | problem with that and users. It's not clear even the best
           | mobile OS could displace Android + iOS.
           | 
           | If I were Microsoft, and I wanted to get in, I'd probably
           | fork Android, to maintain app compatibility. Doing that well
           | would mean killing the goose which is currently laying the
           | golden eggs, though, as it would require replacing Google
           | apps with Microsoft ones. A lot of what makes Android work
           | are free Google accounts, whereas Office 365 is $100 per
           | year. I don't think a Microsoft phone would be competitive
           | unless it had all the same stuff for free, and likely more.
           | 
           | I actually feel like Android is starting to be a little bit
           | vulnerable; a privacy-preserving, non-user-hostile version
           | could have pretty good uptake. Again, not the business
           | Microsoft is in.
        
         | michaelbuckbee wrote:
         | Microsoft's gunning for a far more short-term win: Search.
         | 
         | Bing has been an also-ran in the search world for a decade
         | (single digit % of search volume compared to Google's 90%+),
         | and AI has shown the first real crack in Google's monopoly.
         | 
         | The future is pretty clearly going to be directly getting AI
         | answers to questions and much less looking at a page of 10 blue
         | links and it's still really unclear if Google is going to make
         | the transition.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | >The future is pretty clearly going to be directly getting AI
           | answers to questions
           | 
           | with a subscription model, no ads, and therefore no seo
           | manipulation of content/answers. I'm all for it!
        
         | dmitrygr wrote:
         | > Getting to AGI is like getting to first nuke for tech
         | behemoths.
         | 
         | Except, unlike AGI, nukes happened. We are no closer to AGI
         | than we were when we lived in caves. We found a small local
         | maximum (LLMs), I have seen _NO_ evidence that there is a path
         | from here to AGI.
        
           | fragmede wrote:
           | Even if LLMs _are_ a local maxima, given that we 're even
           | asking that question implies that we are closer to AGI than
           | caveman who didn't have GPUs, even if we don't know exactly
           | how much closer. Unless it takes us 12,000 years to get to
           | AGI, which, it could, since we don't have it yet, but
           | assuming we get AGI before 12,000 years are up, which is when
           | the end of the Paleolithic era was, then yes, we can say we
           | _are_ closer to AGI than cavemen, regardless of if LLM or
           | GPUs are how it comes about. If it never does, then this
           | comment will age poorly in 12,000 years, but I 'm okay with
           | that.
        
             | dmitrygr wrote:
             | > given that we're even asking that question implies that
             | we are closer to AGI than caveman
             | 
             | "Am I close to having gills and breathing underwater?" The
             | fact that I asked, changes _nothing_.
        
               | joelfried wrote:
               | You don't think having functional computers being capable
               | of trillions of operations per second is even the
               | slightest bit of an improvement over use of literal
               | stones?
               | 
               | I am genuinely curious: What do you imagine would be the
               | kind of thing that would be a meaningful step towards
               | AGI?
               | 
               | I have no idea when we'll get there for real, but it
               | seems a pretty big assertion that nothing invented in the
               | last 150 years even helped. So what do you think would
               | help?
        
               | dmitrygr wrote:
               | Ok. I'll rephrase. In caves we were 0% there. Now we're
               | 0.00001% there :). Maybe. May need a few more zeroes.
               | What we have helps probably, but hard to be sure how
               | much. Maybe we need 1e40 FLOPS for AGI. In that case
               | going from 1FLOP (human in a cave) to 1e14 FLOPS (a GPU
               | now) is irrelevant.
               | 
               | I'll believe we're closer when we have a computer solve a
               | novel problem that is not a simple pattern match to a
               | similar solution. When a computer can reply to "write me
               | a JIT translator from ARMv5 to ARMv7M" with working code.
               | That takes actual thought and we're not even close.
        
           | thatoneguy wrote:
           | I think the real nuke will be that we're already at some
           | basic level of AGI because human consciousness isn't as
           | complicated as we think it is. I'm guessing we're only 10
           | years out from lowly generative AI getting advanced enough to
           | effectively be what think of AGI now.
        
           | edouard-harris wrote:
           | This seems like a remarkable chain of reasoning. Out of
           | curiosity, what would convince you that there _is_ a path
           | from LLMs (say) to AGI? What would you expect progress along
           | that path to look like?
        
         | Jackson__ wrote:
         | And yet, it's kinda looking like everyone except OAI has hit
         | the same pre-gpt4 capability wall.
         | 
         | I'll hedge my bets on whether AGI is even possible entirely on
         | how much of an improvement we'll see with GPT5. If it is just a
         | marginal improvement, that's basically it for the current ML
         | bubble.
        
           | chasd00 wrote:
           | that's an interesting take, i wonder what the graph looks
           | like of model capability over time. If GPT5 doesn't fit in
           | the curve and a year goes by with no one else showing the
           | same rate of progress... is that it for the LLM hype machine?
        
         | nimbius wrote:
         | >Microsoft knows they won big in Cloud via Azure Big as in 100s
         | of billions.
         | 
         | Malarkey. Microsoft got where they are in cloud by dogfooding
         | every single piece of software they wrote into their cloud
         | platform, every single service they ran on their gaming
         | platform, and every single user on github and minecraft. After
         | that they turned to corporate customers and forced them into
         | the cloud as well and finally made every single end user of
         | windows sign up too (cant miss any of those precious KPIs.) If
         | they won anything it wasnt through genuine consumer desire to
         | use Azure. The efforts were mostly a shuffling of deck chairs
         | and pump-job similar to the IIS wars on netcraft back in the
         | day where M$ would pump their IIS numbers with static content
         | served from parked websites at hosting providers they paid to
         | switch from Apache.
         | 
         | >They have so much money lying around. Better to invest where
         | they think the puck will be.
         | 
         | they also have a track record of building things no one wants
         | and ruining things everyone likes. Minecraft and Github are
         | demonstrably worse in a lot of ways than they were before
         | redmond took the helm. having a lot of money doesnt make you
         | clairvoyant.
         | 
         | >Meta is all in, Google is all in, Microsoft is all in.
         | 
         | who the fuck cares? these are all companies that exist in the
         | nadier of their innovation. that they collectively scrape
         | barrel to come up with tech memes for the business kids isnt
         | exactly remarkable outside the fact they havent delivered
         | anything of value in so long its surprising we still have to
         | hear about them at all.
         | 
         | >Tesla is betting they'll be the biggest robotics company on
         | the planet.
         | 
         | The guys who cant get self-drive right? run by the same guy who
         | pedaled twitter into the ground? sure.
         | 
         | AI is a meme for these companies...a parlour trick they use on
         | the money pump for just another year longer before its
         | reinvented into some other nonsensical sci fi pablum for
         | general consumption under the late hour of capitalism.
        
           | ciberado wrote:
           | Confrontational replies to comments that doesn't provide
           | actual data or concrete examples to support the
           | counterarguments are not very useful. It would be interesting
           | to know why do you find in GitHub worse than before, or why
           | Minecraft is ruined.
           | 
           | Edit: typo fix.
        
         | elorant wrote:
         | It's not just that. Microsoft is in a better position _today_
         | to make big money from AI because their products are in
         | millions of corporations. B2B is their bread and butter. Google
         | isn't in that position, neither is Apple, Meta or most AI
         | companies out there. Microsoft has built trust over decades of
         | selling OSes and offering legendary backwards compatibility in
         | anything they build. This is what the big spenders want.
        
           | karamanolev wrote:
           | How is Google not? A quick search points that Google
           | Workspace has a huge market penetration.
        
             | SkyPuncher wrote:
             | Correct, but there's typically a divide between workspace
             | tools and infrastructure for ownership, compliance, and
             | approval internally.
             | 
             | In a prior life, our IT manager was the owner of Microsoft
             | productivity products and I was the owner of Azure. We both
             | had drastically different risk profiles and governance
             | needs.
        
             | elorant wrote:
             | Those are all web toys. We're talking about databases and
             | CRMs and programming languages and all the stuff that make
             | the backbone of big corporations.
        
             | kccqzy wrote:
             | The Google Workspace is roughly comparable with Office 365.
             | But Microsoft has a lot more than just Office.
        
           | jjtheblunt wrote:
           | i think you're overlooking iOS instances with "neural"
           | accelerators in the pockets of the people in those
           | corporations.
        
             | elorant wrote:
             | And how will that materialize? Will Apple build a new AI
             | chip that would be affordable enough to embed in every
             | iPhone, or whatever new device they will invent? Or will it
             | all be cloud based where it should be able to support
             | hundreds of millions of users?
             | 
             | Microsoft already has the cloud infrastructure ready. They
             | don't need to build a new device, or a new operating
             | system, or whatever. They're milking the AI cow as we
             | speak.
        
               | jjtheblunt wrote:
               | Apple has had "AI chips" in the iOS devices for years
               | already. I wonder what you define as an AI chip, though,
               | since we could be discussing different sorts of custom
               | accelerators.
        
               | elorant wrote:
               | Look at what a company called Groq does. Their chip can
               | generate 500 tokens/second from a model like Llama 2 70b.
               | 
               | https://groq.com/
        
         | netdur wrote:
         | I believe Google stands apart; although their current offerings
         | sucks, they possess all the necessary components, including
         | software, data, and hardware.
        
       | azinman2 wrote:
       | What I don't get is that mistral is really only possible because
       | of Meta.. and Meta has a user limit on the license. Does that not
       | apply to Microsoft hosting this? Isn't the economics quite weird
       | here? I'd be pissed if I were meta that someone took my model
       | that I spent millions on and now will host a fine tuned version
       | for money facilitated by Microsoft.
        
         | allanrbo wrote:
         | Why do you say Mistral only possible because of Meta?
        
       | anonym29 wrote:
       | Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39517016
        
       | reissbaker wrote:
       | Huh, I wonder if this comes with an OpenAI-like exclusivity deal
       | for Mistral's closed models. If so, Satya just wrapped up pretty
       | much the two largest names in AI other than Google.
       | 
       | Sad but expected that Mistral is releasing its newer models as
       | closed source. There was never a clear revenue stream from the
       | open models.
       | 
       | I'm confused why they aren't allowing their models to be
       | finetuned, though -- that seems like an obvious way to compete
       | with OpenAI, which only allows finetuning of its pretty weak
       | gpt-3.5-turbo. Sure, Mistral can't quite beat GPT-4 yet, even if
       | it's close -- but allowing finetuning would likely result in way
       | better than GPT-4 performance on a broad variety of tasks (as
       | long as you picked a few to specialize in).
        
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