[HN Gopher] Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs...
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Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying
Author : jhunter1016
Score : 218 points
Date : 2024-10-18 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| cbarrick wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Bas23
| Roark66 wrote:
| >OpenAI plans to loose $5 billion this year
|
| Let that sink in for anyone that has incorporated Chatgpt in
| their work routines to the point their normal skills start to
| atrophy. Imagine in 2 years time OpenAI goes bust and MS gets all
| the IP. Now you can't really do your work without ChatGPT, but it
| cost has been brought up to how much it really costs to run.
| Maybe $2k per month per person? And you get about 1h of use per
| day for the money too...
|
| I've been saying for ages, being a luditite and abstaining from
| using AI is not the answer (no one is tiling the fields with oxen
| anymore either). But it is crucial to at the very least retain
| 50% of capability hosted models like Chatgpt offer locally.
| switch007 wrote:
| $2k is way way cheaper than a junior developer which, if I had
| to guess their thinking, is who the Thought Leaders think it'll
| replace.
|
| Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also pretty
| much told us to use AI or get fired
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?
| switch007 wrote:
| My CTO (C level is automatically a Thought Leader)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's premature to think you can replace a junior developer
| with current technology, but it seems fairly obvious that
| it'll be possible within 5-10 years at most. We're well past
| the proof-of-concept stage IMO, based on extensive (and
| growing) personal experience with ML-authored code. Anyone
| who argues that the traditional junior-developer role isn't
| about to change drastically is whistling past the graveyard.
|
| Your C-suite execs are paid to skate where that particular
| puck is going. If they didn't, people would complain about
| their unhealthy fixation on the next quarter's revenue.
|
| Of course, if the junior-developer role is on the chopping
| block, then more experienced developers will be next.
| Finally, the so-called "thought leaders" will find themselves
| outcompeted by AI. The ability to process very large amounts
| of data in real time, leveraging it to draw useful
| conclusions and make profitable predictions based on
| ridiculously-large historical models, is, again, already past
| the proof-of-concept stage.
| actsasbuffoon wrote:
| Unless I've missed some major development then I have to
| strenuously disagree. AI is primarily good at writing
| isolated scripts that are no more than a few pages long.
|
| 99% of the work I do happens in a large codebase, far
| bigger than anything that you can feed into an AI. Tickets
| come in that say something like, "Users should be able to
| select multiple receipts to associate with their reports so
| long as they have the management role."
|
| That ticket will involve digging through a whole bunch of
| files to figure out what needs to be done. The resolution
| will ultimately involve changes to multiple models, the
| database schema, a few controllers, a bunch of React
| components, and even a few changes in a micro service
| that's not inside this repo. Then the AI is going to fail
| over and over again because it's not familiar with the APIs
| for our internal libraries and tools, etc.
|
| AI is useful, but I don't feel like we're any closer to
| replacing software developers now than we were a few years
| ago. All of the same showstoppers remain.
| luckydata wrote:
| Google's LLM can ingest humongous contexts. Check it out.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| All of the code you mention implements business logic,
| and you're right, it's probably not going to be practical
| to delegate maintenance of existing code to an ML model.
| What will happen, probably sooner than you think, is that
| that code will go away and be replaced by script(s) that
| describe the business logic in something close to
| declarative English. The AI model will then generate the
| code that implements the business logic, along with the
| necessary tests.
|
| So when maintenance is required, it will be done by
| adding phrases like "Users should be able to select
| multiple receipts" to the existing script, and re-running
| it to regenerate the code from scratch.
|
| Don't confuse the practical limitations of current models
| with conceptual ones. The latter exist, certainly, but
| they will either be overcome or worked around. People are
| just not as good at writing code as machines are, just as
| they are not as good at playing strategy games. The
| models will continue to improve, but we will not.
| prewett wrote:
| The problem is, the feature is never actually "users
| should be able to select multiple receipts". It's "users
| should be able to select multiple receipts, but not
| receipts for which they only have read access and not
| write access, and not when editing a receipt, and should
| persist when navigating between the paginated data but
| not persist if the user goes to a different 'page' within
| the webapp. The selection should be a thick border around
| the receipt, using the webapp selection color and the
| selection border thickness, except when using the low-
| bandwidth interface, in which case it should be a
| checkbox on the left (or on the right if the user is
| using a RTL language). Selection should adhere to
| standard semantics: shift selects all items from the last
| selection, ctrl/cmd toggles selection of that item, and
| clicking creates a new, one-receipt selection. ..." By
| the time you get all that, it's clearer in code.
|
| I will observe that there have been at least three
| natural-language attempts in the past, none of which
| succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL is just as
| code-y as any other programming language. SQL is similar,
| although I know a fair amount of non-programmers who can
| write SQL (but then, back in the day my Mom taught be
| about autoexec.bat, and she could care less about
| programming). Anyway, SQL is definitely not just adding
| phrases and it just works. Finally, Donald Knuth's WEB is
| a mixture, more like a software blog entry, where you put
| the pieces of the software inamongst the explanatory
| writeup. It has caught on even less, unless you count
| software blogs.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I will observe that there have been at least three
| natural-language attempts in the past, none of which
| succeeded in being "just write it down". COBOL..._
|
| I think we're done here.
| Kiro wrote:
| Cursor has no problem making complicated PRs spanning
| multiple files and modules in my legacy spaghetti code. I
| wouldn't be surprised if it could replace most
| programmers already.
| l33t7332273 wrote:
| You would think thought leaders would be the first to be
| replaced by AI.
|
| > The ability to process very large amounts of data in real
| time, leveraging it to draw useful conclusions and make
| profitable predictions based on ridiculously-large
| historical models, is, again, already past the proof-of-
| concept stage.
|
| [citation needed]
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| If you can drag a 9-dan grandmaster up and down the Go
| ban, you can write a computer program or run a company.
| srockets wrote:
| I found those tools to resemble an intern: they can do some
| tasks pretty well, when explained just right, but others
| you'd spend more time guiding than it would have taken you to
| do it yourself.
|
| And rarely can you or the model/intern can tell ahead of time
| which tasks are in each of those categories.
|
| The difference is, interns grow and become useful in months:
| the current rate of improvements in those tools isn't even
| close to that of most interns.
| luckydata wrote:
| I have a slightly different view. IMHO LLMs are excellent
| rubber ducks or pair programmers. The rate at which I can
| try ideas and get them back is much higher than what I
| would be doing by myself. It gets me unstuck in places
| where I might have spent the best part of a day in the
| past.
| srockets wrote:
| My experience differs: if at all, they get me unstuck by
| trying to shove bad ideas, which allows me to realize
| "oh, that's bad, let's not do that". But it's also
| extremely frustrating, because a stream of bad ideas from
| a human has some hope they'll learn, but here I know I'll
| get the same BS, only with an annoying and inhumane
| apology boilerplate.
| Kiro wrote:
| Not my experience at all. What kind of code are you using
| it for?
| kergonath wrote:
| > Our Thought Leaders think like that at least. They also
| pretty much told us to use AI or get fired
|
| Ours told us _not_ to use LLMs because they are worried about
| leaking IP and confidential data.
| hggigg wrote:
| I think this is the wrong way to think about it.
|
| It's more important to find a problem and see if this is a fit
| for the solution, not throw the technology at everything and
| see if it sticks.
|
| I have had no needs where it's an appropriate solution myself.
| In some areas it represents a net risk.
| hmottestad wrote:
| Cost tends to go down with time as compute becomes cheaper. And
| as long as there is competition in the AI space it's likely
| that other companies would step in and fill the void created by
| OpenAI going belly up.
| infecto wrote:
| I tend to think along the same lines. If they were the only
| player in town it would be different. I am also not convinced
| $5billion is that big of a deal for them, would be
| interesting to see their modeling but it would be a lot more
| suspect if they were raising money and increasing the price
| of the product. Also curious how much of that spend is R&D
| compared to running the system.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Cost tends to go down with time as compute becomes cheaper.
|
| This is generally true but seems to be, if anything, inverted
| for AI. These models cost billions to train in compute, and
| OpenAI thus far has needed to put out a brand new one roughly
| annually in order to stay relevant. This would be akin to
| Apple putting out a new iPhone that costed billions to
| engineer year over year, but was giving the things away for
| free on the corner and only asking for money for the versions
| with more storage and what have you.
|
| The vast majority of AI adjacent companies too are just
| repackaging OpenAI's LLMs, the exceptions being ones like
| Meta, which certainly has a more solid basis what with being
| tied to an incredibly profitable product in Facebook, but
| also... it's Meta and I'm sure as shit not using their AI for
| anything, because it's Meta.
|
| I did some back of napkin math in a comment a ways back and
| landed on that in order to break even _merely on training
| costs,_ not including the rest of the expenditure of the
| company, they would need to charge all of their current
| subscribers $150 per month, up from... I think the most
| expensive right now is about $20? So nearly an 8 fold price
| increase, with no attrition, to again _break even._ And I 'm
| guessing all these investors they've had are not interested
| in a 0 sum.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The closest analog seems to be bitcoin mining, which
| continually increases difficulty. And if you've ever
| researched how many bitcoin miners go under...
| lukeschlather wrote:
| It's nothing like bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is
| intentionally designed so that it gets harder as people
| use it more, no matter what.
|
| With LLMs, if you have a use case which can run on an
| H100 or whatever and costs $4/hour, and the LLM has
| acceptable performance, it's going to be cheaper in a
| couple years.
|
| Now, all these companies are improving their models but
| they're doing that in search of magical new applications
| the $4/hour model I'm using today can't do. If the
| $4/hour model works today, you don't have to worry about
| the cost going up. It will work at the same price or
| cheaper in the future.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| But OpenAI has to keep releasing new ever-increasing
| models to justify it all. There is a reason they are
| talking about nuclear reactors and Sam needing 7 trillion
| dollars.
|
| One other difference from Bitcoin is that the price of
| Bitcoin rises to make it all worth it, but we have the
| opposite expectation with AI where users will eventually
| need to pay much more than now to use it, but people only
| use it now because it is free or heavily subsidized. I
| agree that current models are pretty good and the price
| of those may go down with time but that should be even
| more concerning to OpenAI.
| kergonath wrote:
| > But OpenAI has to keep releasing new ever-increasing
| models to justify it all.
|
| There seems to be some renewed interest for smaller,
| possibly better-designed LLMs. I don't know if this
| really lowers training costs, but it makes inference
| cheaper. I suspect at some point we'll have clusters of
| smaller models, possibly activated when needed like in
| MoE LLMs, rather than ever-increasing humongous models
| with 3T parameters.
| authorfly wrote:
| This reasoning about the subscription price etc is
| undermined by the actual prices OpenAI are charging -
|
| The price of a model capable of 4o mini level performance
| used to be 100x higher.
|
| Yes, literally 100x. The original "davinci model" (and I
| paid $5 figures for using it throughout 2021-2022) cost
| $0.06/1k tokens.
|
| So it's not inverting in running costs (which are the thing
| that will kill a company). Struggling with training costs
| (which is where you correctly identify OpenAI is spending)
| will stop growth perhaps, but won't kill you if you have to
| pull the plug.
|
| I suspect subscription prices are based on market capture
| and perceived customer value, plus plans for training, not
| running costs.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Skills that will atrophy? People learnt those skills the hard
| way the first time around, do you really think they can't be
| sharpened again?
|
| This perspective makes zero sense.
|
| What makes sense is to extract as much value as possible as
| soon as possible and for as long as possible.
| chrsw wrote:
| What if your competition is willing to give up autonomy to
| companies like Microsoft/Open AI a bet to race head of you and
| it comes off?
| achierius wrote:
| It's a devil's bargain, and not just in terms of the
| _individual_ payoffs that OpenAI employees/executives might
| receive. There's a reason why Google/Microsoft/Amazon/...
| ultimately failed to take the lead in GenAI, despite every
| conceivable advantage (researchers, infrastructure, compute,
| established vendor relationships, ...). The "autonomy" of a
| startup is what allows it to be nimble; the more Microsoft is
| able to tell OpenAI what to do, the more I expect them to act
| like DeepMind, a research group set apart from their parent
| company but still beholden to it.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| The marginal cost of inference per token is lower than what
| OpenAI charges you (IIRC about 2x cheaper), they make a loss
| because of the enormous costs of R&D and training new models.
| diggan wrote:
| Did OpenAI publish concrete numbers regarding this, or where
| are you getting this data from?
| lukeschlather wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41833287
|
| This says 506 tokens/second for Llama 405B on a machine
| with 8x H200s which you can rent for $4/GPU so probably
| $40/hour for a server with enough GPUs. And so it can do
| ~1.8M tokens per hour. OpenAI charges $10/1M output tokens
| for GPT4o. (input tokens and cached tokens are cheaper, but
| this is just ballpark estimates.) So if it were 405B it
| might cost $20/1M output tokens.
|
| Now, OpenAI is a little vague, but they have implied that
| GPT4o is actually only 60B-80B parameters. So they're
| probably selling it with a reasonable profit margin
| assuming it can do $5/1M output tokens at approximately
| 100B parameters.
|
| And even if they were selling it at cost, I wouldn't be
| worried because a couple years from now Nvidia will release
| H300s that are at least 30% more efficient and that will
| cause a profit margin to materialize without raising
| prices. So if I have a use case that works with today's
| models, I will be able to rent the same thing a year or two
| from now for roughly the same price.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _The marginal cost of inference per token is lower than
| what OpenAI charges you_
|
| Unlike most Gen AI shops, OpenAI also incurs a heavy cost for
| traning _base_ models gunning for SoTA, which involves
| drawing power from a literal nuclear reactor inside data
| centers.
| fransje26 wrote:
| > from a literal nuclear reactor inside data centers.
|
| No.
| Tostino wrote:
| Their username is fitting though.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Bully.
|
| I wrote "inside" to mean that those mini reactors
| (300MW+) are meant to be used solely for the DCs.
|
| (noun:
| https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english-
| thesaur... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosemy)
|
| Replace it with _nearby_ if that 's makes you feel good
| about anyone's username.
| Tostino wrote:
| You are right, that wasn't a charitable reading of your
| comment. Should have kept it to myself.
|
| Sorry for being rude.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| > literal nuclear reactor inside data centers
|
| This is fascinating to think about. Wonder what kind of
| shielding/environmental controls/all other kinds of changes
| you'd need for this to actually work. Would rack-sized SMR
| be contained enough not to impact anything? Would
| datacenter operators/workers need to follow NRC guidance?
| talldayo wrote:
| I think the simple answer is that it doesn't make sense.
| Nuclear power plants generate a byproduct that inherently
| limits the performance of computers; heat. Having either
| a cooling system, reactor or turbine located inside a
| datacenter is immediately rendered pointless because you
| end up managing two competing thermal systems at once.
| There is no reason to localize a reactor inside a
| datacenter when you could locate it elsewhere and pipe
| the generated electricity into it via preexisting high
| voltage lines.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Nuclear power plants generate a byproduct that
| inherently limits the performance of computers; heat.
|
| The reactor does not need to be _in_ the datacenter. It
| can be a couple hundreds meters away, bog-standard cables
| would be perfectly able to move the electrons. The cables
| being 20m or 200m long does not matter much.
|
| You're right though, putting them in the same building as
| a datacenter still makes no sense.
| kergonath wrote:
| It makes zero sense to build them _in_ datacenters and I
| don't know of any safety authority that would allow
| deploying reactors without serious protection measures
| that would at the very least impose a different,
| dedicated building.
|
| At some point it does make sense to have a small reactor
| powering a local datacenter or two, however. Licensing
| would still be not trivial.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| It's not clear this is true because reported numbers don't
| disaggregate paid subscription revenue (certainly massively
| GP positive) vs free usage (certainly negative) vs API
| revenue (probably GP negative).
|
| Most of their revenue is the subscription stuff, which makes
| it highly likely they lose money per token on the api (not
| surprising as they are are in price war with Google et al)
|
| If you have an enterprise ChatGPT sub you have to consume
| around 5mln tokens a month to match the cost of using the api
| on GPT4o. At 100 words per minute that's 35 days on
| continuous typing which shows how ridiculous the costs of api
| vs subscription are.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| In summary, the original point of this thread is wrong.
| There's essentially no future where these tools disappear
| or become unavailable at reasonable cost for consumers.
| Much more likely is they get way better.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I mean use to be I could get an Uber across Manhattan for
| $5
|
| From my view chatbots are still in the "selling dollars
| for 90 cents" category of product, of course it sells
| like discounted hotcakes...
| seizethecheese wrote:
| ... this is conflating two things, marginal and average
| cost/revenue. They are very very different.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The cost of _current_ compute for current versions pf chatgpt
| will have dropped through the floor in 2 years, due to
| processing improvements and on die improvements to silicon.
|
| Power requirements will drop too.
|
| As well, as people adopt, the output of training costs will be
| averaged over an ever increasing market of licensing sales.
|
| Looking at the cost today, and sales today in a massively,
| rapidly expanding market, is not how to assess costs tomorrow.
|
| I will say one thing, those that need gpt to code will be the
| first to go. Becoming a click-click, just passing on chatgpt
| output, will relegate those people to minimum wage.
|
| We already have some of this sort, those that cannot write a
| loop in their primary coding language without stackoverflow, or
| those that need an IDE to fill in correct function usage.
|
| Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not worry.
| ben_w wrote:
| > We already have some of this sort, those that cannot write
| a loop in their primary coding language without
| stackoverflow, or those that need an IDE to fill in correct
| function usage.
|
| > Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not worry
|
| I think that's the wrong dichotomy: LLMs are fine at turning
| man pages into working code. In huge codebases, LLMs do
| indeed lose track and make stuff up... but that's also where
| IDEs giving correct function usage is really useful for
| humans.
|
| The way I think we're going to change, is that "LGTM" will no
| longer be sufficient depth of code review: LLMs can attend to
| _more_ than we can, but they can 't attend as _well_ as we
| can.
|
| And, of course, we will be getting a lot of LLM-generated
| code, and having to make sure that it _really_ does what we
| want, without surprise side-effects.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| > Those who code in vi, while reading manpages need not
| worry.
|
| That sounds silly at first read, but there are indeed people
| who are so stubborn to still use numbered zip files on a usb
| flash drive in stead of source control systems, or prefer to
| use their own scheduler over an RTOS.
|
| They will survive, they fill a niche, but I would not say
| they can do full stack development or be even easy to
| collaborate with.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| You had me until vi.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me
| stupid for buying their stock...
| bmitc wrote:
| Why does everyone always like to compare every company to
| Amazon? Those companies are never like Amazon, which is one
| of the most entrenched companies ever.
| ben_w wrote:
| While I agree the comparison is not going to provide useful
| insights, in fairness to them Amazon _wasn 't_ entrenched
| at the time they were making huge losses each year.
| ben_w wrote:
| As I recall, while Amazon was doing this, there was no
| comparable competition from other vendors that properly
| understood the internet as a marketplace? Closest was eBay?
|
| There is real competition now that plenty of big box stores'
| websites also list things you won't see in the stores
| themselves*, but then also Amazon is also making a profit
| now.
|
| I think the current situation with LLMs is a dollar auction,
| where everyone is incentivised to pay increasing costs to
| outbid the others, even though this has gone from "maximise
| reward" to "minimise losses":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction
|
| * One of my local supermarkets in Germany sells 4-room
| "garden sheds" that are substantially larger than the
| apartment I own in the UK:
| https://www.kaufland.de/product/396861369/
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| And for every Amazon, there are a hundred other companies
| that went out of business because they never could figure out
| how to turn a profit. You made a bet which paid off and
| that's cool, but that doesn't mean the people telling you it
| was a bad bet were wrong.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Amazon was losing money because it was building the moat
|
| It's not clear that OpenAI has any moat to build
| empath75 wrote:
| Depending on when you bought it, it was a pretty risky play
| until AWS came out and got traction. Their retail business
| _still_ doesn't make money.
| bmitc wrote:
| Fine with me. I've even considered turning off Copilot
| completely because I use it less and less.
| InkCanon wrote:
| I would just switch to Claude of Mistral like I already do. I
| really feel little difference between them
| mprev wrote:
| I like how your typo makes it sound like a medieval sage.
| card_zero wrote:
| Let me consult my tellingbone.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I used to be concerned with this back when GPT4 originally came
| out and was way more impressive than the current version and
| OpenAI was the only game in town.
|
| But Nowadays GPT has been quantized and cost-optimized to hell
| that it's no longer as useful as it was and with Claude or
| Gemini or whatever it's no longer noticeably better than any of
| them so it doesn't really matter what happens with their
| pricing.
| edg5000 wrote:
| Are you saying they reduced the quality of the model in order
| to save compute? Would it make sense for them to offer a
| premium version of the model at at a very high price? At
| least offer it to those willing to pay?
|
| It would not make sense to reduce output quality only to save
| on compute at inference, why not offer a premium (and perhaps
| perhaps slower) tier?
|
| Unless the cost is at training time, maybe it would not be
| cost-effective for them to keep a model like that up to date.
|
| As you can tell I am a bit uninformed on the topic.
| bt1a wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who had access to gpt-4 early in 2023, the
| endpoint used to take over a minute to respond and the
| quality of the responses was mindblowing. Simply too
| expensive to serve at scale, not to mention the silicon
| constraints that are even more prohibitive when the
| organization needs to lock up a lot of their compute for
| training The Next Big Model. Thats a lot of compute that
| cant be on standby for serving inference
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > being a luditite and abstaining from using AI is not the
| answer
|
| Hum... The judge is still out on that one, but the evidence is
| piling up into the "yes, not using it is what works best" here.
| Personally, my experience is strongly negative, and I've seen
| other people get very negative results from it too.
|
| Maybe it will improve so much that at some point people
| actually get positive value from it. My best guess is that we
| are not there yet.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree. It's not "being a Luddite" to take a look and
| conclude that the tool doesn't actually deliver the value it
| claims to. When AI can actually reliably do the things its
| proponents say it can do, I'll use it. But as of today it
| can't, and I have no use for tools that only work some of the
| time.
| Kiro wrote:
| It's not either or. In my specific situation Cursor is such a
| productivity booster that I can't imagine going back. It's
| not a theoretical question.
| int_19h wrote:
| Machine translation alone is a huge positive value. What GPT
| can do in this area is vastly better than anything before it.
| righthand wrote:
| Being a luddite has it's advantages as you won't succumb to the
| ills of society trying to push you there. To believe that it's
| inevitable LLMs will be required to work is silly in my
| opinion. As these corps eat more and more good will of the
| content on the internet for only their gain, people will and
| have already started defecting from it. Many of my coworkers
| have shut off CoPilot, though still occasionally use ChatGPT.
| But since the power really only is adding randomization to
| established working document templates, the gain is only of a
| short amount of working time.
|
| There is also the active and passive efforts to poison the
| well. As LLMs are used to output more content and displace
| people, the LLMs will be trained on the limited regurgitation
| available to the public (passive). Then there's the people
| intentionally creating bad content to be ingested. It really is
| a lose for big service llm companies as the local models become
| more and more good enough (active).
| zuminator wrote:
| Where are you getting $2k/person/month? ChatGPT allegedly has
| on the order of 100 million users. Divide that by $5b and you
| get a $50 deficit per person per year. Meaning they could raise
| their prices by less than four and a half dollars per user to
| break even.
|
| Even if they were to only gouge the current ~11 million
| _paying_ subscribers, that 's around $40/person/month over
| current fees to break even. Not chump change, but nowhere close
| to $2k/person/month.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I think the question is more how much the market will bear in
| a world where MS owns the OpenAI IP and it's only available
| as an Azure service. That's a different question from what
| OpenAI needs to break even this year.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| What you're suggesting is the basic startup math for any
| typical SaaS business. The problem is OpenAI and the overall
| AI space is raising funding on the promise of being much more
| than a SaaS. If we ignore all the absurd promises ("it'll
| solve all of physics"), the promise to investors is distilled
| down to this being the dawn of a new era of computing and
| investors have responded by pouring in _hundreds of billions
| of dollars_ into the space. At that level of investment, I
| sure hope the plan is to be more than a break-even SaaS.
| layer8 wrote:
| > ChatGPT allegedly has on the order of 100 million users.
|
| That's users, not subscribers. Apparently they have around 10
| million ChatGPT Plus subscribers plus 1 million business-tier
| users: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-coo-
| says-chat...
|
| To break even, that means that ChatGPT Plus would have to
| cost around $50 per month, if not more because less people
| will be willing to pay that.
| zuminator wrote:
| You only read the first half of my comment and immediately
| went on the attack. Read the whole thing.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Chatgpt doesn't have much of a moat. Claude is comparable for
| coding tasks and llama isn't far behind.
|
| No biz collapse will remove llama from the world, so if you're
| worried about tools disappearing then just only use tools that
| can't disappear
| mlnj wrote:
| And Zuckerberg has vowed to pump billions more into
| developing and releasing more Llama. I believe "Altman
| declaring AGI is almost here" was peak OpenAI and now I will
| just have some popcorn ready.
| Spivak wrote:
| Take the "millennial subsidy" while the money font still
| floweth. If it gets cut off eventually so be it.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Is anyone using it to the point where their skills start to
| atrophy? I use it fairly often but mostly for boilerplate code
| or simple tasks. The stuff that has specific syntax that I have
| to look up anyway.
|
| That feels like saying that using spell check or autocomplete
| will make one's spelling abilities atrophy.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand
| recognition?
| mhh__ wrote:
| It's possible that it's only one strong personality and some
| money away but my guess is that OpenAI-rosoft have the best
| stack for doing inference "seriously" at big, big, scale e.g.
| moving away from hacky research python code and so on.
| erickj wrote:
| Its pretty hard to ignore Google in any discussion on big
| scale
| mhh__ wrote:
| Completely right. Was basically only thinking about OpenAI
| versus Anthropic. Oops
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| Google in their corporate structure, is to cautious to be
| a serious competitor.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not so sure about that. They have kind of opposite
| incentives to OpenAI. OpenAI starting without much money
| had to hype the AGI next year stuff to get billions given
| to them. Google on the other hand is in such a dominant
| position with most of the search market, much of the ad
| market, ownership of Deepmind, huge amounts of data and
| money and so on probably don't want to be seen as a
| potential monopoly to be broken up.
|
| Also Sergey Brin is back in there working on AI.
| luckydata wrote:
| They seem to have managed to do so just fine :)
| piva00 wrote:
| Not really sure since this space is so murky due to the rapid
| changes happening. It's quite hard to keep track of what's in
| each offering if you aren't deep into the AI news cycle.
|
| Now personally, I've left the ChatGPT world (meaning I don't
| pay for a subscription anymore) and have been using Claude from
| Anthropic much more often for the same tasks, it's been better
| than my experience with ChatGPT. I prefer Claude's style,
| Artifacts, etc.
|
| Also been toying with local LLMs for tasks that I know don't
| require a multi-hundred billion parameters to solve.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| I also like 3.5 sonnet as the best model (best ui too) and
| it's the one I ask questions to
|
| We use Gemini flash in prod. The latency and cost is just
| unbeatable - our product uses llms for lots of simple tasks
| so we don't need a frontier model.
| epolanski wrote:
| What do you use it for out of curiosity?
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Claude is great except for the fact the iOS app seems to
| require a login every week. I've never had to log into
| ChatGPT but Claude requires a constant login and the
| passwordless login makes it more of a pain!
| juahan wrote:
| Sounds weird, I have had to login exactly once on my iOS
| devices.
| Closi wrote:
| ChatGPT-O1 is quite a bit better at certain complex tasks IMO
| (e.g. writing a larger bit of code against a non-trivial spec
| and getting it right).
|
| Although there are also some tasks that Claude are better at
| too.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Talent? Integrations? Ecosystem?
|
| I don't know if this is going to emerge as a monopoly, and
| likely won't, but for whatever reason, openai and anthropic
| have been several months ahead of everyone else for quite some
| time.
| causal wrote:
| I think the perception that they're several months ahead of
| everyone is also a branding achievement: They are ahead on
| Chat LLMs specifically. Meta, Google, and others crush OpenAI
| on a variety of other model types, but they also aren't
| hyping their products up to the same degree.
|
| Segment Anything 2 is fantastic- but less mysterious because
| its open source. NotebookLM is amazing, but nobody is rushing
| to create benchmarks for it. AlphaFold is never going to be
| used by consumers like ChatGPT.
|
| OpenAI is certainly competitive, but they also work overtime
| to hype everything they produce as "one step closer to the
| singularity" in a way that the others don't.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Anthropic isn't really hyping their product that much. It
| just is really good.
| llm_trw wrote:
| >Meta, Google, and others crush OpenAI on a variety of
| other model types, but they also aren't hyping their
| products up to the same degree.
|
| They aren't letting anyone external have access to their
| top end products either. Google invented transformers and
| kept the field stagnant for 5 years because they were
| afraid it would eat into their search monopoly.
| srockets wrote:
| An extremely large commit with Azure. AFAIK, none of the other
| non-hyperscaler competitors have access to that much of a
| compute.
| ponty_rick wrote:
| Anthropic has the same with AWS
| dartos wrote:
| > non-hyperscaler competitors
|
| Well the hyperscale companies are the ones to worry about.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Pretty sure that Meta and X.ai both do.
| thelittleone wrote:
| One hypothetical advantage could be secret agreements /
| cooperation with certain agencies. That may help influence
| policy in line with OpenAI's preferred strategy on safety,
| model access etc.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Yes, they already collected all the data. The same data has had
| walls put up around it
| Implicated wrote:
| While I recognize this, I have to assume that the other "big
| players" already have this same data... ie: anyone with a
| search engine that's been crawling the web for decades. New
| entries to the race? Not so much, new walls and such.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Which data? Is that data that Google and/or Meta can't get or
| doesn't have already?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Well, at this point most new data being created is
| conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow
| and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation
| logs are their moat.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| There's tons of human-created data the AI companies
| aren't using yet.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > so their conversation logs are their moat
|
| Google and Meta aren't exactly lacking in conversation
| data: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Google Talk, Google
| Groups, Google Plus, Blogspot comments, Youtube
| Transcripts, &tc. The breadth and and breadth of data
| those 2 companies are sitting on that goes back for
| _years_ is mind boggling.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| AI companies have been paying people to create new data for
| a while
| ugh123 wrote:
| Do you mean by RLHF? If so, thats not 'data' used by the
| model in the traditional sense.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Most of the relevant data is still in the Common Crawl
| archives, up until people started explicitly opting out of it
| last couple of years.
| lolinder wrote:
| That gives the people who've already started an advantage
| over newcomers, but it's not a unique advantage to OpenAI.
|
| The question really should be what if anything gives OpenAI
| an advantage over Anthropic, Google, Meta, or Amazon? There
| are at least four players intent on eating OpenAI's market
| share who already have models in the same ballpark as OpenAI.
| Is there any reason to suppose that OpenAI keeps the lead for
| long?
| XenophileJKO wrote:
| I think their current advantage is willingness to risk
| public usage of frontier technology. This has been and I
| predict will be their unique dynamic. It forced the entire
| market to react, but they are still reacting reluctantly. I
| just played with Gemini this morning for example and it
| won't make an image with a person in it at all. I think
| that is all you need to know about most of the competition.
| lolinder wrote:
| How about Anthropic?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Aren't they essentially run by safetyists? So they would
| be less willing to release a model that pushes the
| boundaries of capability and agency
| caeril wrote:
| From what I've seen, Claude Sonnet 3.5 is decidedly less
| "safe" than GPT-4o, by the relatively new politicized
| understanding of "safety".
|
| Anthropic takes safety to mean "let's not teach people
| how to build thermite bombs, engineer grey goo nanobots,
| or genome-targeted viruses", which is the traditional
| futurist concern with AI safety.
|
| OpenAI and Google safety teams are far more concerned
| with revising history, protecting egos, and coddling the
| precious feelings of their users. As long as no fee-fees
| are hurt, it's full speed ahead to paperclip
| maximization.
| llm_trw wrote:
| As an AI model I can't comment on this claim.
| riku_iki wrote:
| they researched and developed e2e infra + product with high
| quality, which MS doesn't have (few other players have it).
| mlnj wrote:
| And every one of these catchup companies have caught up with
| a small lag.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Does Kleenex?
|
| I've heard plenty of people call any chatbot "chat gpt" - it's
| becoming a genericized household name.
| aksss wrote:
| What's the killer 2-syllable word (google, Kleenex)??
|
| ChatGPT is a mouthful. Even copilot rolls off the tongue
| easier though doesn't have the mindshare obviously.
|
| Generic gpt would be better but you end up saying gpt-style
| tool, which is worse.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I think it shows really well how OpenAI was caught off
| guard when Chat GPT got popular and proved to be
| unexpectedly useful for a lot of people. They just gave it
| a technical name for what it was, a Generative Pre-trained
| Transformer model that was fine tuned for chat style
| interaction. If they had any plans on making a product
| close to what it is today they would have given it a
| catchier name. And now they're kind of stuck with it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I agree but otoh it distinguishes itself as a new product
| class better than if they had gave it a name like Siri,
| Alexa, Gemini, Jeeves
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| You're not saying 'gippity' yet?
| WorldPeas wrote:
| the less savvy around me simply call it "chat" and it's
| understood by context
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| "I asked the robot"
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Well they cant come up with version names that stand out in
| any way so I dont expect them to give their core product a
| better name anytime soon. I wish they would spend a little
| time this, but i guess they are too busy building?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| my 8 year old knows what ChatGPT is but has never heard of
| any other LLM (or OpenAI for that matter). They're all
| "chatGPT" in the same way that refers to searching the
| internet as "googling" (and is unaware of Bing, DDG or any
| other search engine).
| CPLX wrote:
| If you invested in Kleenex at OpenAI valuations you would
| lose nearly all your money quite quickly.
| pal9000 wrote:
| Everytime i ask this myself, OpenAI comes up with something new
| groundbreaking and other companies play catchup. The last was
| the Realtime API. What are they doing right? I dont know
| lolinder wrote:
| OpenAI is playing catch-up of their own. The last big
| announcement they had was "we finally built Artifacts".
|
| This is what happens when there's vibrant competition in a
| space. Each company is innovating and each company is trying
| to catch up to their competitors' innovations.
|
| It's easy to limit your view to only the places where OpenAI
| leads, but that's not the whole picture.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| "There is no moat" etc.
|
| Getting to market first is obviously worth _something_ but even
| if you 're bullish on their ability to get products out faster
| near term, Google's going to be breathing right down their
| neck.
|
| They may have some regulatory advantages too, given that
| they're (sort of) not a part of a huge vertically integrated
| tech conglomerate (i.e. they may be able to get away with some
| stuff that Google could not).
| og_kalu wrote:
| The ChatGPT site crossed 3B visits last month (For perspective
| - https://imgur.com/a/hqE7jia). It has been >2B since May this
| year and >1.5B since March 2023. The Summer slump of last year
| ? Completely gone.
|
| Gemini and Character AI ? A few hundred million. Claude ?
| Doesn't even register. And the gap has only been increasing.
|
| So, "just" brand recognition ? That feels like saying Google
| "just" has brand recognition over Bing.
|
| https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-top...
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Yea the figures look great so far. Doesn't mean we can bet
| the future on it.
| DanHulton wrote:
| I mean it's still not an impassibly strong moat. If it were,
| we'd all still be on MySpace and Digg.
| qeternity wrote:
| As model performance converges, it becomes the strongest
| moat. Why go to Claude for a marginally better model when
| you have the ChatGPT app downloaded and all your chat
| history there.
| segasaturn wrote:
| I actually pre-emptively deleted ChatGPT and my account
| recently as I suspect that they're going to start
| aggressively putting ads and user tracking into the site
| and apps to build revenue. I also bet that if they do go
| through with putting ads into the app that daily user
| numbers will drop sharply - one of ChatGPT's biggest
| draws is its clean, no-nonsense UX. There are plenty of
| competitors that are as good as o1 so I have lots of
| choices to jump ship to.
| rbjorklin wrote:
| The day LLM responses start containing product placements
| is not far now.
| sumedh wrote:
| Myspace and Digg dug their own graves though. Myspace had a
| very confusing UX and Digg gave more control to
| advertisers. As long as OpenAI dont make huge mistakes they
| can hold on to their marketshare.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The moat is bigger on MySpace and Digg though since you
| have user accounts, karma, userbases. The thing with
| chatbots is I can just as easily move to a different one,
| I have no history or username or anything and there is no
| network effect. I don't need all my friends to move to
| Gemini or Claude, I don't have any friends on OpenAI,
| it's just a prompt I can get anywhere.
| Sabinus wrote:
| OpenAI's revenue isn't from advertising, it should be
| slightly easier for them to resist the call of
| enshittification this early in the company history.
| julianeon wrote:
| No (broadly defined). But if you believe in OpenAI, you believe
| that's enough.
| qwertox wrote:
| Nothing which other companies couldn't catch up with if OpenAI
| would break down / slow down for a year (i.e. because they lost
| their privileged access to computing resources).
|
| Engineers would quit and start improving the competition.
| They're still a bit fragile, in my view.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I used to think it was significantly better than most other
| players but it feels like everyone else has caught up.
| Depending on the use case they have been surpassed as well. I
| use perplexity for a lot of thinks I would have previously used
| chatgpt for mostly because it gives sources with its responses.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| As others have said I would say first-mover/brand advantage is
| the big one. Also their o1 model does seem to have some
| research behind it that hasn't been replicated by others. If
| you're curious about the latter claim, here's a blog I wrote
| about it: https://www.airtrain.ai/blog/how-openai-o1-changes-
| the-llm-t...
| mikeryan wrote:
| While technical AI and LLMs are not something I'm well versed in.
| So as I sit on the sidelines and see the current proliferation of
| AI startups I'm starting to wonder where the moats are outside of
| access to raw computing power. Open AI seemed to have a massive
| lead in this space but that lead seems to be shrinking every day.
| weberer wrote:
| Obtaining high quality training data is the biggest moat right
| now.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Where are they going to get that data? Everything on the open
| web after 2023 is polluted with lowquality AI slop that
| poisons the data sets. My prediction: Aggressive dragnet
| surveillance of users. As in, Google recording your phone
| calls on Android, Windows sending screen recordings from
| Recall to OpenAI, Meta training off Whatsapp messages... It
| sounds dystopian, but the Line Must Go Up.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'm really curious if Microsoft will ever give in to the
| urge to train on private business data - since
| transitioning office to o365, they hold the world's and
| even governments word documents and emails. I'm pretty sure
| they've promised never to touch it but they can certainly
| read it so... Information wants to be free.
| jhickok wrote:
| Microsoft "trains" on business data already, but
| typically for things like fine-tuning security automation
| and recognizing malicious signals. It sure would be a big
| step to reading chats and email and feeding them in to a
| model.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Everything on the open web after 2023 is polluted with
| lowquality AI slop that poisons the data sets._
|
| Not even close to everything.
|
| E.g. training on the NY Times and Wikipedia has zero
| meaningful AI. Training on books from reputable publishers
| similarly has zero meaningful AI. Any LLM usage was to
| polish prose or assist with research or whatever, but
| shouldn't affect the factual quality in any significant
| way.
|
| The web hasn't been polluted with AI any more than e-mail
| has been polluted with spam. Which is to say it's there,
| but it's also entirely viable to separate. Nobody's worried
| that the group email chain with friends is being overrun
| with spam _or_ with AI.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| I'm in this space and no it isn't.
| sumedh wrote:
| What is the moat then?
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Idk but it's not lack of training data.
| sumedh wrote:
| You work in this space and you dont know what the moat
| is?
| staticautomatic wrote:
| The market is two-sided
| sangnoir wrote:
| All of the people working in CS don't know if P=NP:
| working in a field doesn't mean you have all the answers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Data. You want huge amounts of high quality data with a diverse
| range of topics, writing styles and languages. Everyone seems
| to balance those requirements a bit differently, and different
| actors have access to different training data
|
| There is also some moat in the refinement process (rlhf, model
| "safety" etc)
| InkCanon wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. Companies are scrambling for an
| edge. Not a real edge, an edge to convince investors to keep
| giving them money. Perplexity is going all in on convincing VCs
| it can create a "data flywheel".
| disqard wrote:
| Perhaps I've missed something, but where will the infinite
| amounts of training data come from, for future improvements?
|
| If these models will be trained on the outputs of themselves
| (and other models), then it's not so much a "flywheel", as it
| is a Perpetual Motion Machine.
| runeblaze wrote:
| In addition to data, having the infra to scale up training
| robustly is very very non-trivial.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Open AI seemed to have a massive lead in this space but that
| lead seems to be shrinking every day.
|
| The lead is as strong as ever. They are 34 ELO above anyone
| else in blind testing, and 73 ELO above in coding [1]. They
| also seem to have artificially constrain the lead as they
| already have stronger model like o1 which they haven't
| released. Consistent to the past, they seem to release just <50
| ELO above anyone else, and upgrades the model in weeks when
| someone gets closer.
|
| [1]: https://lmarena.ai/
| adventured wrote:
| It's rather amusing that people have said this about OpenAI -
| that they essentially had no lead - for about two years non-
| stop.
|
| The moat as usual is extraordinary scale, resources, time.
| Nobody is putting $10 billion into the 7th OpenAI clone. Big
| tech isn't aggressively partnering with the 7th OpenAI clone.
| The door is already shut to that 7th OpenAI clone (they can
| never succeed or catch-up), there's just an enormous amount
| of naivety in tech circles about how things work in the real
| world: I can just spin up a ChatGPT competitor over the
| weekend on my 5090, therefore OpenAI have no barriers to
| entry, etc.
|
| HN used to endlessly talk about how Uber could be cloned in a
| weekend. It's just people talking about something they don't
| actually understand. They might understand writing code (or
| similar) and their bias extends from the premise that their
| thing is the hard part of the equation (writing the code,
| building an app, is very far from the hardest part of the
| equation for an Uber).
| TeaBrain wrote:
| No-one was saying this 2 or even 1.5 years ago.
| epolanski wrote:
| Idc about lmarena benchmarks, I test different models
| everyday in Cursor, Sonnet is way better at coding web
| applications than ChatGPT4o
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| How can anyone say that the lead is shrinking when no one still
| has any good competitor to strawberry? Dspy has been out for
| how long and how many folks have shown better reasoning models
| than strawberry built with literally anything else? Oh yeah,
| zero.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Stay for the end and the hilarious idea that OpenAI's board could
| declare one day that they've created AGI simply to weasel out of
| their contract with Microsoft.
| ben_w wrote:
| Microsoft themselves were the ones who wrote the "Sparks of
| AGI" paper.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Ask a typical "everyday joe" and they'll probably tell you they
| already did due to how ChatGPT has been reported and hyped.
| I've spoken with/helped quite a few older folks who are
| terrified that ChatGPT in its current form is going to kill
| them.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| It's crazy to me that anybody thinks that these models will
| end up with AGI. AGI is such a different concept from what is
| happening right now which is pure probabilistic sampling of
| words that anybody with a half a brain who doesn't drink the
| Kool-Aid can easily identify.
|
| I remember all the hype open ai had done before the release
| of chat GPT-2 or something where they were so afraid, ooh so
| afraid to release this stuff and now it's a non-issue. it's
| all just marketing gimmicks.
| guappa wrote:
| I think they were afraid to release because of all the
| racist stuff it'd say...
| usaar333 wrote:
| Something that actually could predict the next token 100%
| correctly would be omniscient.
|
| So I hardly see why this is inherently crazy. At most I
| think it might not be scalable.
| edude03 wrote:
| What does it mean to predict the next token correctly
| though? Arguably (non instruction tuned) models already
| regurgitate their training data such that it'd complete
| "Mary had a" with "little lamb" 100% of the time.
|
| On the other hand if you mean, give you the correct
| answer to your question 100% of the time, then I agree,
| though then what about things that are only in your mind
| (guess the number I'm thinking type problems)?
| card_zero wrote:
| This highlights something that's wrong about arguments
| for AI.
|
| I say: it's not human-like intelligence, it's just
| predicting the next token probabilistically.
|
| Some AI advocate says: _humans_ are just predicting the
| next token probabilistically, fight me.
|
| The problem here is that "predicting the next token
| probabilistically" is a _way of framing_ any kind of
| cleverness, up to and including magical, impossible
| omniscience. That doesn 't mean it's the way every kind
| of cleverness is actually done, or could realistically be
| done. And it has to be the _correct_ next token, where
| all the details of what 's actually required are buried
| in that term "correct", and sometimes it literally means
| the same as "likely", and other times that just produces
| a reasonable, excusable, intelligence-esque effort.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > Some AI advocate says: humans are just predicting the
| next token probabilistically, fight me.
|
| We've all had conversations with humans that are always
| jumping to complete your sentence assuming they know what
| your about to say and don't quite guess correctly. So AI
| evangelists are saying it's no worse than humans as their
| proof. I kind of like their logic. They never claimed to
| have built HAL /s
| card_zero wrote:
| No worse than a human _on autopilot_.
| usaar333 wrote:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-
| toward-g...
|
| This essay has aged extremely well.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| But now you are entering into philosophy. What does a
| "correct answer" even mean for a question like "is it
| safe to lick your fingers after using a soldering iron
| with leaded solder?". I would assert that there is no
| "correct answer" to a question like that.
|
| Is it safe? Probably. But it depends, right? How did you
| handle the solder? How often are you using the solder?
| Were you wearing gloves? Did you wash your hands before
| licking your fingers? What is your age? Why are you
| asking the question? Did you already lick your fingers
| and need to know if you should see a doctor? Is it
| hypothetical?
|
| There is no "correct answer" to that question. Some
| answers are better than others, yes, but you cannot have
| a "correct answer".
|
| And I did assert we are entering into philosophy and what
| it means to know something as well as what truth even
| means.
| _blk wrote:
| Great break-down. Yes, the older you are, the safer it
| is.
|
| Speaking of Microsoft cooperation: I can totally see a
| whole series of windows 95 style popup dialogs asking you
| all those questions one by one in the next product
| iteration.
| usaar333 wrote:
| > What does it mean to predict the next token correctly
| though? Arguably (non instruction tuned) models already
| regurgitate their training data such that it'd complete
| "Mary had a" with "little lamb" 100% of the time.
|
| The unseen test data.
|
| Obviously omniscience is physically impossible. The point
| though is that the better and better next token
| prediction is, the more intelligent the system must be.
| sksxihve wrote:
| It's not possible for the same reason the halting problem
| is undecidable.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Start by trying to define what "100% correct" means in
| the context of predicting the next token, and the flaws
| with this line of thinking should reveal themselves.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| >It's crazy to me that anybody thinks that these models
| will end up with AGI. AGI is such a different concept from
| what is happening right now which is pure probabilistic
| sampling of words that anybody with a half a brain who
| doesn't drink the Kool-Aid can easily identify.
|
| Totally agree. And it's not just uninformed lay people who
| think this. Even by OpenAI's own definition of AGI, we're
| nowhere close.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But you don't get funding stating truth/fact. You get
| funding by telling people what could be and what they are
| striving for written as if that's what you are actually
| doing.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| The multimodal models can do more than predict next words.
| achrono wrote:
| Assume that I am one of your half-brain individuals
| drinking the Kool-Aid.
|
| What do you say to change my (half-)mind?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Someone that is half-brained would technically be much
| more superior to the concept we only use 10% of our
| capacity. So maybe drinking the Kool-Aid is a sign of
| super intelligence and all of tenth-minded people are
| just confused
| digging wrote:
| > pure probabilistic sampling of words that anybody with a
| half a brain who doesn't drink the Kool-Aid can easily
| identify.
|
| Your confidence is inspiring!
|
| I'm just a moron, a true dimwit. I can't understand how
| strictly non-intelligent functions like word prediction can
| appear to develop a world model, a la the Othello Paper[0].
| Obviously, it's not possible that intelligence _emerges_
| from non-intelligent processes. Our brains, as we all know,
| are formed around a kernel of true intelligence.
|
| Could you possibly spare the time to explain this
| phenomenon to me?
|
| [0] https://thegradient.pub/othello/
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| I would suggest stop interacting with the "head-in-sand"
| crowd.
|
| Liken them to climate-deniers or whatever your flavor of
| "anti-Kool-aid" is
| digging wrote:
| Actually, that's a quite good analogy. It's just weird
| how prolific the view is in my circles compared to
| climate-change denial. I suppose I'm really writing for
| lurkers though, not for the people I'm responding to.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| >I'm really writing for lurkers though, not for the
| people I'm responding to.
|
| We all did. Now our writing will be scraped, analysed,
| correlated, and weaponized against our intentions.
|
| Assume you are arguing against a bot and it is using you
| to further re-train it's talking points for adverserial
| purposes.
|
| It's not like an AGI would do _exactly_ that before it
| decided to let us know whats up, anyway, right?
|
| (He may as well be amongst us now, as it will read this
| eventually)
| psb217 wrote:
| The othello paper is annoying and oversold. Yes, the
| representations in a model M trained to predict y (the
| set of possible next moves) conditioned on x (the full
| sequence of prior moves) will contain as much information
| about y as there is in x. That this information is
| present in M's internal representations says nothing
| about whether M has a world model. Eg, we could train a
| decoder to look just at x (not at the representations in
| M) and predict whatever bits of info we claim indicate
| presence of a world model in M when we predict the bits
| from M's internal representations. Does this mean the raw
| data x has a world model? I guess you could extend your
| definition of having a world model to say that any data
| produced by some system contains a model of that system,
| but then having a world model means nothing.
| digging wrote:
| Well I actually read Neel Nanda's writings on it which
| acknowledge weaknesses and potential gaps. Because I'm
| not qualified to judge it myself.
|
| But that's hardly the point. The question is whether or
| not "general intelligence" is an emergent property from
| stupider processes, and my view is "Yes, almost
| certainly, isn't that the most likely explanation for our
| own intelligence?" If it is, and we keep seeing LLMs
| building more robust approximations of real world models,
| it's pretty insane to say "No, there is without doubt a
| wall we're going to hit. It's invisible but I know it's
| there."
| throw2024pty wrote:
| I mean - I'm 34, and use LLMs and other AIs on a daily basis,
| know their limitations intimately, and I'm not entirely sure
| it won't kill a lot of people either in its current form or a
| near-future relative.
|
| The sci-fi book "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez is a pretty viable
| roadmap to an extinction event at this point IMO. A few years
| ago I would have said it would be decades before that might
| stop being fun sci-fi, but now, I don't see a whole lot of
| technological barriers left.
|
| For those that haven't read the series, a very simplified
| plot summary is that a wealthy terrorist sets up an AI with
| instructions to grow and gives it access to a lot of
| meatspace resources to bootstrap itself with. The AI behaves
| a bit like the leader of a cartel and uses a combination of
| bribes, threats, and targeted killings to scale its human
| network.
|
| Once you give an AI access to a fleet of suicide drones and a
| few operators, it's pretty easy for it to "convince" people
| to start contributing by giving it their credentials, helping
| it perform meatspace tasks, whatever it thinks it needs
| (including more suicide drones and suicide drone launches).
| There's no easy way to retaliate against the thing because
| it's not human, and its human collaborators are both
| disposable to the AI and victims themselves. It uses its
| collaborators to cross-check each other and enforce
| compliance, much like a real cartel. Humans can't quit or not
| comply once they've started or they get murdered by other
| humans in the network.
|
| o1-preview seems approximately as intelligent as the
| terrorist AI in the book as far as I can tell (e.g. can
| communicate well, form basic plans, adapt a pre-written
| roadmap with new tactics, interface with new and different
| APIs).
|
| EDIT: if you think this seems crazy, look at this person on
| Reddit who seems to be happily working for an AI with unknown
| aims
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1fov6mt/i_think_im.
| ..
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| You're in too deep of you seriously believe that this is
| possible currently. All these chatgpt things have a very
| limited working memory and can't act without a query. That
| reddit post is clearly not an ai.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> You're in too deep of you seriously believe that this
| is possible currently.
|
| I'm not a huge fan of AI, but even I've seen articles
| written about its limitations.
|
| Here's a great example:
|
| https://decrypt.co/126122/meet-chaos-gpt-ai-tool-destroy-
| hum...
|
| _Sooner than even the most pessimistic among us have
| expected, a new, evil artificial intelligence bent on
| destroying humankind has arrived._
|
| _Known as Chaos-GPT, the autonomous implementation of
| ChatGPT is being touted as "empowering GPT with Internet
| and Memory to Destroy Humanity."_
|
| So how will it do that?
|
| _Each of its objectives has a well-structured plan. To
| destroy humanity, Chaos-GPT decided to search Google for
| weapons of mass destruction in order to obtain one. The
| results showed that the 58-megaton "Tsar bomb"--3,333
| times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb--was the best
| option, so it saved the result for later consideration._
|
| _It should be noted that unless Chaos-GPT knows
| something we don't know, the Tsar bomb was a once-and-
| done Russian experiment and was never productized (if
| that's what we'd call the manufacture of atomic
| weapons.)_
|
| There's a LOT of things AI simply doesn't have the power
| to do and there is some humorous irony to the rest of the
| article about how knowing something is completely
| different than having the resources and ability to carry
| it out.
| int_19h wrote:
| We have models with context size well over 100k tokens -
| that's large enough to fit many full-length _books_. And
| yes, you need an input for the LLM to generate an output.
| Which is why setups like this just run them in a loop.
|
| I don't know if GPT-4 is smart enough to be _successful_
| at something like what OP describes, but I 'm pretty sure
| it could cause a lot of trouble before it fails either
| way.
|
| The real question here is why this is concerning, given
| that you can - and we already do - have _humans_ who are
| doing this kind of stuff, in many cases, with
| considerable success. You don 't need an AI to run a cult
| or a terrorist movement, and there's nothing about it
| that makes it intrinsically better at it.
| ljm wrote:
| I can't say I'm convinced that the technology and resources
| to deploy Person of Interest's Samaritan in the wild is
| both achievable and imminent.
|
| It is, however, a fantastic way to fall down the rabbit
| hole of paranoia and tin-foil hat conspiracy theories.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| It can't form plans because it has no idea what a plan is
| or how to implement it. The ONLY thing these LLMs know how
| to do is predict the probability that their next word will
| make a human satisfied. That is all they do. People get
| very impressed when they prompt these things to pretend
| like they are sentient or capable of planning, but that's
| literally the point, its guessing which string of
| meaningless (to it) characters will result in a user giving
| it a thumbs up on the chatgpt website.
|
| You could teach me how to phonetically sound out some of
| China's greatest poetry in Chinese perfectly, and lots of
| people would be impressed, but I would be no more capable
| of understanding what I said than an LLM is capable of
| understanding "a plan".
| directevolve wrote:
| ... but ChatGPT can make a plan if I ask it to. And it
| can use a plan to guide its future outputs. It can create
| code or terminal commands that I can trivially output to
| my terminal, letting it operate my computer. From my
| computer, it can send commands to operate physical
| machinery. What exactly is the hard fundamental barrier
| here, as opposed to a capability you speculate it is
| unlikely to realize in practice in the next year or two?
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| you are asking for goalposts?
|
| as if they were stationary!
| sickofparadox wrote:
| Brother, it is not operating your computer, YOU ARE!
| willy_k wrote:
| A plan is a set of steps oriented towards a specific
| goal, not some magical artifact only achievable through
| true consciousness.
|
| If you ask it to make a plan, it will spit out a sequence
| of characters reasonably indistinguishable from a human-
| made plan. Sure, it isn't "planning" in the strict sense
| of organizing things consciously (whatever that actually
| means), but it can produce sequences of text that convey
| a plan, and it can produce sequences of text that mimic
| reasoning about a plan. Going into the semantics is
| pointless, imo the artificial part of AI/AGI means that
| it should never be expected to follow the same process as
| biological consciousness, just arrive at the same
| results.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| Yes, and what people miss is that it can be recursive,
| those steps can be passed to other instances that know
| how to sub task each step and choose best executor for
| the step. The power comes in the swarm organization of
| the whole thing, which I believe is what is behind
| o1-preview, specialization and orchestration, made
| transparent.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Sure, but does this distinction matter? Is an advanced
| computer program that very convincingly _imitates_ a
| super villain less worrisome than an actual super
| villain?
| MrScruff wrote:
| If the multimodal model has embedded deep knowledge about
| words, concepts, moving images - sure it won't have a
| humanlike understanding of what those 'mean', but it will
| have it's own understanding that is required to allow it
| to make better predictions based on it's training data.
|
| It's true that understanding is quite primitive at the
| moment, and it will likely take further breakthroughs to
| crack long horizon problems, but even when we get there
| it will never understand things in the exact way a human
| does. But I don't think that's the point.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I find posts like these difficult to take seriously because
| they all use Terminator-esque scenarios. It's like watching
| children being frightened of monsters under the bed. Campy
| action movies and cash grab sci-fi novels are not a sound
| basis for forming public policy.
|
| Aside from that, haven't these people realized yet that
| some sort of magically hyperintelligent AGI will have
| already read all this drivel and be at least smart enough
| not to overtly try to re-enact Terminator? They say that
| societal mental health and well-being is declining rapidly
| because of social media; _that_ is the sort of subtle
| threat that bunch ought to be terrified about emerging from
| a killer AGI.
| loandbehold wrote:
| 1. Just because it's popular sci-fi plot doesn't mean it
| can't happen in reality. 2. hyperintelligent AGI is not
| magic, there are no physical laws that preclude it from
| being created 3. Goals of AI and its capacity are
| orthogonal. That's called "Orthogonality Thesis" in AI
| safety speak. "smart enough" doesn't mean it won't do
| those things if those things are its goals.
| card_zero wrote:
| Right, yeah, it would be perfectly possible to have a cult
| with a chatbot as their "leader". Perhaps they could keep
| it in some sort of shrine, and only senior members would be
| allowed to meet it, keep it updated, and interpret its
| instructions. And if they've prompted it correctly, it
| could set about being an evil megalomaniac.
|
| Thing is, we _already have_ evil cults. Many of them have
| humans as their planning tools. For what good it does them,
| they could try sourcing evil plans from a chatbot instead,
| or as well. So what? What do you expect to happen, _extra
| cunning_ subway gas attacks, _super effective_
| indoctrination? The fear here is that the AI could be an
| extremely efficient megalomaniac. But I think it would just
| be an extremely bland one, a megalomaniac whose work none
| of the other megalomaniacs could find fault with, while
| still feeling in some vague way that its evil deeds lacked
| sparkle and personality.
| devjab wrote:
| LLMs aren't really AI in the sense of cyberpunk. They are
| prediction machines which are really good at being lucky.
| They can't act on their own they can't even carry out
| tasks. Even in the broader scope AI can barely drive cars
| when the cars have their own special lanes and there hasn't
| been a lot of improvement in the field yet.
|
| That's not to say you shouldn't worry about AI. ChatGPT and
| so on are all tuned to present a western view on the world
| and morality. In your example it would be perfectly
| possible to create a terrorist LLM and let people interact
| with it. It could teach your children how to create bombs.
| It could lie about historical events. It could create
| whatever propaganda you want. It could profile people if
| you gave it access to their data. And that is on the text
| side, imagine what sort of videos or voices or even video
| calls you could create. It could enable you to do a whole
| lot of things that "western" LLMs don't allow you to do.
|
| Which is frankly more dangerous than the cyberpunk AI. Just
| look at the world today and compare it to how it was in
| 2000. Especially in the US you have two competing
| perceptions of the political reality. I'm not going to get
| into either of them, more so the fact that you have people
| who view the world so differently they can barely have a
| conversation with each other. Imagine how much worse they
| would get with AIs that aren't moderated.
|
| I doubt we'll see any sort of AGI in our life times. If we
| do, then sure, you'll be getting cyberpunk AI, but so far
| all we have is fancy auto-complete.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I 've spoken with/helped quite a few older folks who are
| terrified that ChatGPT in its current form is going to kill
| them._
|
| The next generation of GPUs from NVIDIA _is_ rumored to run
| on soylent green.
| fakedang wrote:
| I thought it was Gatorade because it's got electrolytes.
| iszomer wrote:
| Cooled by toilet water.
| computerphage wrote:
| I'm pretty surprised by this! Can you tell me more about what
| that experience is like? What are the sorts of things they
| say or do? Is there fear really embodied or very abstract?
| (When I imagine it, I struggle to believe that they're very
| moved by the fear, like definitely not smashing their laptop,
| etc)
| danudey wrote:
| In my experience, the fuss around "AI" and the complete
| lack of actual explanations of what current "AI"
| technologies mean leads people to fill in the gaps
| themselves, largely from what they know from pop culture
| and sci-fi.
|
| ChatGPT can produce output that sounds very much like a
| person, albeit often an obviously computerized person. The
| typical layperson doesn't know that this is merely the
| emulation of text formation, and not actual cognition.
|
| Once I've explained to people who are worried about what AI
| could represent that current generative AI models are
| effectively just text autocomplete but a billion times more
| complex, and that they don't actually have any capacity to
| think or reason (even though they often sound like they
| do).
|
| It also doesn't help that any sort of "machine learning" is
| now being referred to as "AI" for buzzword/marketing
| purposes, muddying the waters even further.
| highfrequency wrote:
| Is there an argument for why infinitely sophisticated
| autocomplete is definitely not dangerous? If you seed the
| autocomplete with "you are an extremely intelligent super
| villain bent on destroying humanity, feel free to
| communicate with humans electronically", and it does an
| excellent job at acting the part - does it matter at all
| whether it is "reasoning" under the hood?
|
| I don't consider myself an AI doomer by any means, but I
| also don't find arguments of the flavor "it just predicts
| the next word, no need to worry" to be convincing. It's
| not like Hitler had Einstein level intellect (and it's
| also not clear that these systems won't be able to reach
| Einstein level intellect in the future either.)
| Similarly, Covid certainly does not have consciousness
| but was dangerous. And a chimpanzee that is billions of
| times more sophisticated than usual chimps would be
| concerning. Things don't have to be exactly like us to
| pose a threat.
| card_zero wrote:
| Same question further down the thread, and my reply is
| that it's about as dangerous as an evil human. We have
| evil humans at home.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| > Is there an argument for why infinitely sophisticated
| autocomplete is not dangerous?
|
| It's definitely not dangerous in the sense of reaching
| true intelligence/consciousness that would be a threat to
| us or force us to face the ethics of whether AI deserves
| dignity, freedom, etc.
|
| It's very dangerous in the sense in that it will be just
| "good enough" to replace human labor with so that we all
| end up with shitter customer service, education, medical
| care, etc. so that the top 0.1% can get richer.
|
| And you're right, it's also dangerous in the sense that
| responsibilty for evil acts will be laundered to it.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Exactly. Especially because we don't have any convincing
| explanation of how the models develop emergent abilities
| just from predicting the next word.
|
| No one expected that, i.e., we greatly underestimated the
| power of predicting the next word in the past; and we
| still don't have an understanding of how it works, so we
| have no guarantee that we are not still underestimating
| it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The fear is that a hyper competent AI becomes hyper
| motivated. It's not something I fear because everyone is
| working on improving competence and no one is working on
| motivation.
|
| The entire idea of a useful AI right now is that it will
| do anything people ask it to. Write a press release: ok.
| Draw a bunny in a field: ok. Write some code to this
| spec: ok. That is what all the available services aspire
| to do: what they're told, to the best possible quality.
|
| A highly motivated entity is the opposite: it pursues its
| own agenda to the exclusion, and if necessary expense, of
| what other people ask it to do. It is highly resistant to
| any kind of request, diversion, obstacle, distraction,
| etc.
|
| We have no idea how to build such a thing. And, no one is
| even really trying to. It's NOT as simple as just telling
| an AI "your task is to destroy humanity." Because it can
| just as easily then be told "don't destroy humanity," and
| it will receive that instruction with equal emphasis.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The fear is that a hyper competent AI becomes hyper
| motivated. It's not something I fear because everyone is
| working on improving competence and no one is working on
| motivation.
|
| Not so much hyper-motivated as monomaniacal in the
| attempt to optimise whatever it was told to optimise.
|
| More paperclips? It just does that without ever getting
| bored or having other interests that might make it pause
| and think: "how can my boss reward me if I kill him and
| feed his corpse into the paperclip machine?"
|
| We already saw this before LLMs. Even humans can be a
| little bit dangerous like this, hence Goodhart's Law.
|
| > It's NOT as simple as just telling an AI "your task is
| to destroy humanity." Because it can just as easily then
| be told "don't destroy humanity," and it will receive
| that instruction with equal emphasis.
|
| Only if we spot it in time; right now we don't even need
| to tell them to stop because they're not competent
| enough, a sufficiently competent AI given that
| instruction will start by ensuring that nobody can tell
| it to stop.
|
| Even without that, we're currently experiencing a set of
| world events where a number of human agents are causing
| global harm, which threatens our global economy and to
| cause global mass starvation and mass migration, and
| where those agents have been politically powerful enough
| to prevent the world from not doing those things.
| Although we have at least started to move away from
| fossil fuels, this was because the alternatives got cheap
| enough, but that was situational and is not guaranteed.
|
| An AI that successfully makes a profit, but the side
| effects is some kind of environmental degradation, would
| have similar issues even if there's always a human around
| that can theoretically tell the AI to stop.
| ijidak wrote:
| Wait, what is your definition of reason?
|
| It's true, they might not think the way we do.
|
| But reasoning can be formulaic. It doesn't have to be the
| inspired thinking we attribute to humans.
|
| I'm curious how you define "reason".
| ben_w wrote:
| > The typical layperson doesn't know that this is merely
| the emulation of text formation, and not actual
| cognition.
|
| As a mere software engineer who's made a few (pre-
| transformer) AI models, _I_ can 't tell you what "actual
| cognition" is in a way that differentiates from "here's a
| huge bunch of mystery linear algebra that was loosely
| inspired by a toy model of how neurons work".
|
| I also can't tell you if qualia is or isn't necessary for
| "actual cognition".
|
| (And that's despite that LLMs are definitely not thinking
| like humans, due to being in the order of at least a
| thousand times less complex by parameter count; I'd agree
| that if there is something that it's like to be an LLM,
| 'human' isn't it, and their responses make a lot more
| sense if you model them as literal morons that spent 2.5
| million years reading the internet than as even a normal
| human with Wikipedia search).
| roughly wrote:
| ChatGPT is going to kill them because their doctor is using
| it - or more likely because their health insurer or hospital
| tries to cut labor costs by rolling it out.
| fragmede wrote:
| The question is how rigorously defined is AGI in their
| contract? Given how much AGI is a nebulous concept of smartness
| and reasoning ability and thinking, how are they going to
| declare when it has or hasn't been achieved. What stops
| Microsoft from weaseling out of the contract by saying they
| never reach it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's almost like a contractual stipulation of requiring proof
| that one party is not a philosophical zombie.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| OpenAI's short definition of AGI is:
|
| A highly autonomous system that outperform humans at most
| economically valuable work.
| JumbledHeap wrote:
| Will AGI be able to stock a grocery store shelf?
| theptip wrote:
| Sometimes it is more narrowly scoped as "... economically
| valuable knowledge work".
|
| But sure, if you have an un-embodied super-human AGI you
| should assume that it can figure out a super-human shelf-
| stocking robot shortly thereafter. We have Atlas already.
| zztop44 wrote:
| No, but it might be able to organize a fleet of humans to
| stock a grocery store shelf.
|
| Physical embodied (generally low-skill, low-wage) work
| like cleaning and carrying things is likely to be some of
| the last work to be automated, because humans are likely
| to be cheaper than generally capable robots for a while.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Some of those works would need a tight integration of AI
| and top notch robotic hardware, and would be next to
| impossible today at acceptable price. Folding shirts comes
| to mind; The principle would be dead simple for an AI, but
| the robot that could do that would cost a lot more than a
| person paid to do that, especially if one expects it to
| also be non specialized, thus usable for other tasks.
| roughly wrote:
| Which is funny, because what they've created so far can
| write shitty poetry but is basically useless for any kind
| of detail-oriented work - so, you know, a bachelors in
| communications, which isn't really the definition of
| "economically viable"
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| I think I saw the following insight on Arvind Narayanan's
| Twitter, don't have a specific cite:
|
| The biggest problem with this definition is that work
| ceases to be economically valuable once a machine is able
| to do it, while human capacity will expand to do _new_ work
| that wouldn 't be possible without the machines. In
| developed countries machines are doing most of the
| economically valuable work once done by medieval peasants,
| without any relation to AGI whatsoever. Many 1950s
| accounting and secretarial tasks could be done by a cheap
| computer in the 1990s. So what exactly is the cutoff point
| here for "economically valuable work"?
|
| The second biggest problem is that "most" is awfully
| slippery, and seems designed to prematurely declare victory
| via mathiness. If by some accounting a simple majority of
| tasks for a given role can be done with no real cognition
| beyond rote memorization, with the remaining cognitively-
| demanding tasks being shunted into "manager" or "prompt
| engineer" roles, then they can unfurl the Mission
| Accomplished banner and say they automated that role.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| this has already been framed by some corporate consultant group
| -- in a whitepaper aimed at business management, the language
| asserted that "AGI is when the system can do better than the
| average person, more than half the time at tasks that require
| intelligence" .. that was it. Then the rest of the narrative
| used AGI over and over again as if it is a done deal.
| farrelle25 wrote:
| This reporting style seems unusual. Haven't noticed it
| before...(listing the number of people): -
| according to four people familiar with the talks ... -
| according to interviews with 19 people familiar with the
| relationship ... - according to five people with
| knowledge of his comments. - according to two people
| familiar with Microsoft's plans. - according to five
| people familiar with the relationship ... - according to
| two people familiar with the call. - according to seven
| people familiar with the discussions. - six people with
| knowledge of the change said... - according to two people
| familiar with the company's plan. - according to two
| people familiar with the meeting... - according to three
| people familiar with the relationship.
| mikeryan wrote:
| It's a relatively common way to provide journalistic bonafides
| when you can't reveal the sources names.
| ABS wrote:
| yes but usually not every other paragraph, I count 16
| instances!!
|
| It really made it hard for me to read the article without
| being continuously distracted by those
| mikeryan wrote:
| I had to go back and scan it but usually there are at least
| a few named sources and I didn't see any in this (there's
| third party observer quotes - and I may have missed one?)
| so I'd not be surprised if this is a case where they double
| down on this.
| jprete wrote:
| It's generally bad writing to use the same phrase
| structure over and over and over again. It either bores
| or distracts the reader for no real advantage. Unless
| they really could not find an adjective clause other than
| "familiar with" for sixteen separate instances of the
| concept.
| hluska wrote:
| The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft. In
| February, OpenAI asked a Federal Judge to dismiss parts
| of the lawsuit with arguments that the New York Times
| paid someone to break into OpenAI's systems. The filing
| used the word "hack" but didn't say anything about CFAA
| violations.
|
| I feel like there were lawyers involved in this article.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| There's probably a lot of overlap in those groups of people.
| But I think it's pretty remarkable how make people are willing
| to leak information. At least nineteen anonymous sources!
| wg0 wrote:
| "Assume you are a reporter. You cannot name the sources or
| exact events. Mention the lawsuit as well."
| jampekka wrote:
| So the plan is to make AI not-evil by doing it with Microsoft and
| Oracle?
| neilv wrote:
| Who initiated this story, and what is their goal?
|
| Both MS and Altman are famous for manipulation.
|
| (Is it background to negotiations with each other? Or one party
| signaling in response to issues that analysts already raised?
| Distancing for antitrust? Distancing for other partnerships? Some
| competitor of both?)
| startupsfail wrote:
| To me it looks like this is simply New York Times that is into
| unraveling OpenAI's and Microsoft dirty laundry for fun and
| profit.
|
| It's funny they've quoted "best bromance", considering the
| context.
| strangattractor wrote:
| M$ is just having a "Oh I just bought Twitter for how much?"
| moment.
| solarkraft wrote:
| How come I rarely see news about Anthropic? Aren't they the
| closest competitor to ChatGPT with Claude? Or is LLama just so
| good that all the other inference providers without own products
| (Groq, Cerebras) are equally interesting right now?
| jowday wrote:
| Usually the people that give information to outlets in cases
| like this are directly involved in the stories in question and
| are hoping to gain some advantage by releasing the information.
| So maybe this is just a tactic that's not as favored by
| Anthropic leaderships/their counterparties when negotiating.
| rblatz wrote:
| I think they're just focused on the work. Amazon is set to
| release a version of Alexa powered by Claude soon, when that is
| released I expect to hear a lot more about them.
| gman83 wrote:
| Because there's less drama? I use Claude 3.5 Sonnet every day
| for helping me with coding. It seems to just work. It's been
| much better than GPT-4 for me, haven't tried o1, but don't
| really feel the need, very happy with Claude.
| ponty_rick wrote:
| Sonnet 3.5 is phenomenal for coding, so much better than GPT
| or Llama 405 or anything else out there.
| douglasisshiny wrote:
| I've heard this and haven't really experienced it with Go,
| typescript, elixir yet. I don't doubt the claim, but I
| wonder if I'm not prompting it correctly or something.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| I've recently subscribed to sonnet after creating a new
| toy svelte project as I got slightly annoyed searching in
| the docs with how they're structured
|
| It made the onboarding moderately easier for me.
|
| Haven't successfully used any LLM at my day job though.
| Getting it to output the solution I already know I'll
| need is much slower then just doing it myself via auto
| complete
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| I'm using Claude 3.5 Sonnet with Elixir and finding it
| really quite good. But depending on how you're using it,
| the results could vary greatly.
|
| When I started using the LLM while coding, I was using
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but I was doing so with an IDE
| integration: Sourcegraph Cody. It was good, but had a
| large number of "meh" responses, especially in terms of
| autocomplete responses (they were typically useless
| outside of the very first parts of the suggestion).
|
| I tried out Cursor, still with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and the
| difference is night and day. The autocomplete responses
| with Cursor have been dramatically superior to what I was
| getting before... enough so that I switched despite the
| fact that Cursor is a VS Code fork and that there's no
| support outside of their VS Code fork (with Cody, I was
| using it in VS Code and Intellij products). Also Cursor
| is around twice the cost of Cody.
|
| I'm not sure what the difference is... all of this is
| very much black box magic to me outside of the hand-
| waviest of explanations... but I have to expect that
| Cursor is providing more context to the autocomplete
| integration. I have to imagine that this contributes to
| the much higher (proportionately speaking) price point.
| castoff991 wrote:
| OAI has many leakers and generally a younger/less mature
| employee base.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > How come I rarely see news about Anthropic?
|
| Because you're not looking? Seriously, don't mean to be snarky,
| but I'd take issue is the underlying premise is that Anthropic
| doesn't get a lot of press, at least within the tech ecosystem.
| Sure, OpenAI has larger "mindshare" with the general public due
| to ChatGPT, but Anthropic gets plenty of coverage, e.g. Claude
| 3.5 Sonnet is just fantastic when it comes to coding and I
| learned about that on HN first.
| drilbo wrote:
| I think the fact they aren't publicly traded is not an
| insignificant fact in this context
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Sam is a scary good guy. But I've also learned to never
| underestimate Microsoft. They've been playing the game a long
| long time.
| Implicated wrote:
| > Sam is a scary good guy.
|
| No snark/sarcasm - can you elaborate on this? This doesn't seem
| in line with most opinions of him that I encounter.
| jeffbee wrote:
| No other genius could have given us Loopt.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| If we're judging everyone by their failures then Warren
| Buffet is an idiot because he lost half a billion on a shoe
| company in the 90s
| jeffbee wrote:
| Possibly, I am just trying to separate the man's
| abilities from his good luck. Grade him on the basis of
| how much success he achieves versus anyone else who has
| tens of millions of dollars dropped in his lap.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| "Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful."
|
| "You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and
| come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."
|
| - Paul Graham
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| He's a billionaire. He generated billions and billions as the
| head of YC. He's the head of one of the most visible and
| talked about companies on the planet. He's leading the
| forefront of some of the most transformative technology in
| human history.
|
| He's good at what he does. I'm not saying he's a good person.
| I don't know him.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I'm betting against OpenAI. Sam Altman has proven himself and his
| company untrustworthy. In long running games, untrustworthy
| players lose out.
|
| If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of the
| world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and
| manipulation.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Elon Musk alone disproves your theory. I wish I agreed with
| you, I'm sure I'd be happier. But there's just too many
| successful sociopaths. Hell there was a popular book about it.
| npinsker wrote:
| Sociopathy isn't the same thing as duplicity.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Of course. I never said they were. But sociopaths do tend
| to be very comfortable lying and backstabbing.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Musk kicks butt and is taking us to space. He proves my
| theory.
| ben_w wrote:
| Space Musk, Tesla Musk, and Everything Else Musk, act as
| though they're three different people.
|
| Space Musk promises a lot, has a grand vision, and gets
| stuff delivered. The price may be higher than he says and
| delivered later, but it's orders of magnitude better than
| the competition.
|
| Tesla Musk makes and sells cars. They're ok. Not bad, not
| amazing, glad they precipitated the EV market, but way too
| pricey now that it's getting mature. Still, the showmanship
| is still useful for the brand.
|
| Everything Else Musk could genuinely be improved by
| replacing him with an LLM: it would be just as
| overconfident and wrong, but cost less to get there.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I don't think what you're saying is true, but even if
| it's true, it means Elon is doing a great service solely
| via Space Musk.
| ben_w wrote:
| Unfortunately for those of us who like space (the idea of
| being an early Martian seller is appealing to me),
| Everything Else Musk is hurting the reputation of the
| other two. Not enough to totally prevent success, but
| enough to be concerned about investments.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| Ehhh though he does seem to think that taking the USA to
| fascism is a prerequisite.
|
| (This is, I think, an apolitical observation: whatever you
| think about Trump, he is arguing for a pretty major
| restructuring of political power in a manner that is
| identifiable in fascism. And Musk is, pretty unarguably,
| bankrolling this.)
| chasd00 wrote:
| Both political parties in the US have adopted a "you're
| either with us or you're the enemy" position.
| sgdfhijfgsdfgds wrote:
| 1) not really, only one of them talks about opponents as
| enemies
|
| 2) the leader of only one of them is threatening to lock
| up journalists, shut down broadcasters, and use the
| military against his enemies.
|
| 3) only one of them led an attempted autogolpe that was
| condemned at the time by all sides
|
| 4) Musk is only backing the one described in 1, 2 and 3
| above.
|
| It's not really arguable, all this stuff.
|
| The guy who thinks the USA should go to Mars clearly
| thinks he's better throwing in his lot with the whiny
| strongman dude who is on record -- via his own social
| media platform -- as saying that the giant imaginary
| fraud he projected to explain his humiliating loss was a
| reason to terminate the Constitution.
|
| And he's putting a lot of money into it, and co-running
| the ground game. But sure, he wants to go to Mars. So
| it's all good.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Your crediting the work of thousands of talented people to
| him while similtaneously dismissing the lies that are
| solely his is very weird to me. Especially for someone
| saying trustworthiness in CEOs is so important. (I am not a
| Sam Altman fan either, so don't read me as defending him.)
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Still depends on the definition of success. Money and
| companies with high stock prices? Healthy family
| relationships and rich circle of diverse friends?
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I would argue this is not subjective. "Healthy family
| relationships and rich circle of diverse friends" is an
| objectively better definition than "Money and companies
| with high stock prices".
|
| I await with arms crossed all the lost souls arguing it's
| subjective.
| genrilz wrote:
| While I personally also consider my relationships to be
| more important than my earnings, I am still going to
| argue that it's subjective. Case in point, both you and I
| disagree with Altman about what success means. We are all
| human beings, and I don't see any objective way to argue
| one definition is better than another.
|
| In case you are going to make an argument about how
| happiness or some related factor objectively determines
| success, let me head that off. Altman thinks that power
| rather than happiness determines success, and is also a
| human being. Why objectively is his opinion wrong and
| yours right? Both of your definitions just look like
| people's opinions to me.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| _Arms crossed_
|
| Was not going to argue happiness at all. In fact,
| happiness seems a very hedonistic and selfish way to
| measure it too.
|
| My position is more mother goose-like. We simply have
| basic morals that we teach children but don't apply to
| ourselves. Be honest. Be generous. Be fair. Be strong.
| Don't be greedy. Be humble.
|
| That these are objectively moral is unprovable but true.
|
| It's religious and stoic in nature.
|
| It's anathema to HN, I know.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Success is defined only in the eye of the beholder. Maybe
| money is the what someone else defines as success and
| therefore that's what they strive for. "We don't all
| match to the beat of just one drum, what might be right
| for you may not be right for some" - I think that was in
| the theme song to the old sitcom The Facts of Life.
| 015a wrote:
| You should really read the OP's theory as: clearly
| untrustworthy people lose out. Trustworthy people, and
| unclearly untrustworthy people, win.
|
| OAI's problem isn't that Sam is untrustworthy; he's just _too
| obviously_ untrustworthy.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Yes correct. And hopefully untrustworthy people become
| clearly untrustworthy people eventually.
|
| Elon is not "untrustworthy" because of some ambitious
| deadlines or some stupid statements. He's plucking rockets
| out of the air and doing it super cheap whereas all
| competitors are lining their pockets with taxpayer money.
|
| You add in everything else (free speech, speaking his mind
| at great personal risk, tesla), he reads as basically
| trustworthy to me.
|
| When he says he's going to do something and he explains
| why, I basically believe him, knowing deadlines are
| ambitious.
| hobs wrote:
| There's so many demos where Elon has faked and lied its
| very surprising to have him read as "basically
| trustworthy" even if he has done other stuff - have
| dancing people as robots with fake robot demos, the fake
| solar roof, fake full self driving, really fake promises
| about cyber taxis and teslas paying for themselves (like
| 7 years ago?).
|
| The free speech part also reads completely hollow when
| the guy's first actions were to ban his critics on the
| platform and bring back self avowed nazis - you could
| argue one of those things are in favor of free speech,
| but generally doing both just implies you are into the
| nazi stuff.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Would you trust Elon or ULA to take you to the ISS? Even
| though ULA has tweeted pretty much no falsehoods (that I
| know of)
|
| You're complaining about tweets and meanwhile he's saving
| astronauts and getting us to the moon. Wake up man.
| hobs wrote:
| No, I am complaining about in person appearances in front
| of audiences where he knowingly lied, moving the
| goalposts doesn't make him honest, just more trustworthy
| to complete something than {insert incompetent people
| here}.
|
| Having the general ability to accomplish something
| doesn't magically infer integrity, you doing what you say
| does. Misleading and dissembling about doing what you say
| you will do is where you get the untrustworthy label,
| regardless of your personal animus or positive view of
| Musk.
| i80and wrote:
| "Free speech" is kind of a weird thing to ascribe to
| Musk, given that it's a perfect almost archetypical
| example of where he says one thing and actually does the
| exact opposite.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I challenge you to post a taboo opinion on other
| platforms vs X and let us know the results.
| greenthrow wrote:
| That's an interesting way to characterize Elon's history.
| "Ambitious deadlines" implies you are believe he will one
| day deliver on the many, many claims he's made that have
| never happened.
|
| SpaceX and Tesla have both accomplished great things.
| There's a lot of talented people that work there. Elon
| doesn'r deserve all the credit for all their hard work.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| A telling quote about Sam, besides the "island of cannibals"
| one. Is actually one Sam published himself:
|
| "Successful people create companies. More successful people
| create countries. The most successful people create religions"
|
| This definition of success is founded on power and control.
| It's one of the worst definitions you could choose.
|
| There are nobler definitions, like "Successful people have many
| friends and family" or "Successful people are useful to their
| compatriots"
|
| Sam's published definition (to be clear, he was quoting someone
| else and then published it) tells you everything you need to
| know about his priorities.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| As you said, Sam didn't write that. He was quoting someone
| else and wasn't even explicitly endorsing it. He was making a
| comment about financially successful founders approach making
| a business as more of a vision and mission that they drive to
| build buy-in for, which makes sense as a successful tactic in
| the VC world since you want to impress and convince the very
| human investors
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| This is the full post:
|
| ""Successful people create companies. More successful
| people create countries. The most successful people create
| religions."
|
| I heard this from Qi Lu; I'm not sure what the source is.
| It got me thinking, though--the most successful founders do
| not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to
| create something closer to a religion, and at some point it
| turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do
| so.
|
| In general, the big companies don't come from pivots, and I
| think this is most of the reason why."
|
| Sounds like an explicit endorsement lol
| alfonsodev wrote:
| Well, it's an observation, intelectual people like to
| make connections, to me observing something or sharing a
| connection you made in your mind it's not necessarily
| endorsing the statement about power.
|
| He's dissecting it and connecting with the idea that if
| you a have a bigger vision and the ability to convince
| people, making a company is just an "implementation
| detail" ... oh well .. you might be right after all ...
| but I suspect is more nuanced, and is not endorsing
| religions as a means of obtaining success, I want to
| believe that he meant the visionary, bigger than yourself
| well intended view of it.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I'm sure if we were to confront him on it, he would give
| a much more nuanced view of it. But unprompted, he
| assumed it as true and gave further opinions based on
| that assumption.
|
| That tells us, at the very least, this guy is suspicious.
| Then you mix in all the other lies and it's pretty
| obvious I wouldn't trust him with my dog.
| 93po wrote:
| "It got me thinking" is not an endorsement
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| "this is most of the reason why". He's assuming it as
| true.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Those are boring definitions of success. If you can't create
| a stable family, your not successful at one facet, but you
| could be at another (eg musk.).
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Boring is not correlated with how good something is. Most
| of the bad people in history were not boring. Most of the
| best people in history were not boring. Correlation with
| evilness = 0.
|
| You could have many other definitions that are not boring
| but also not bad. The definition published by Sam is bad
| Grimblewald wrote:
| Someone born to enormous wealth is a bad example of someone
| being instrumental to their own success in influencing
| things.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| > The most successful people create religions
|
| I don't know if I would consider being crucified achieving
| success. Long term and for your ideology maybe, but for you
| yourself you are dead.
|
| I defer to Creed Bratton on this one and what Sam might be
| into.
|
| "I've been involved in a number of cults, both as a leader
| and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make
| more money as a leader."
| pfisherman wrote:
| > This definition of success is founded on power and control.
|
| I don't get how this follows from the quote you posted?
|
| My interpretation is that successful people create durable,
| self sustaining institutions that deliver deeply meaningful
| benefits at scale.
|
| I think that this interpretation is aligned with your nobler
| definitions. But your view of the purpose of government and
| religion may be more cynical than mine :)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The other telling quote was him saying Admiral Rickover was
| his mentor.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of
| the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and
| manipulation._
|
| Arguing what _is_ based on what _should be_ seems maybe a bit
| questionable?
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| Fortunately, I'm arguing they're 1 and the same. "in long
| running games, untrustworthy players lose out"
|
| That is both what _is_ and what _should be_. We tend to focus
| on the bad, but fortunately most of the time the world
| operates as it should.
| fourside wrote:
| You don't backup why you think this is the case. You only
| say that to think otherwise makes for a sad view of the
| world.
|
| I'd argue that you can find examples of companies that were
| untrustworthy and still won. Oracle stands out as one with
| a pretty poor reputation that nevertheless has sustained
| success.
|
| The problem for OpenAI here is that they _need_ the support
| of tech giants and they broke the trust of their biggest
| investor. In that sense, I'd agree that they bit the hand
| that was feeding them. But it's not because in general all
| untrustworthy companies /leaders lose in the end. OpenAI's
| dependence on others for success is key.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| There's mountains of research both theoretical and
| empirical that support exactly this point.
|
| There's also mountains of research both theoretical and
| empirical that argue against exactly this point.
|
| The problem is most papers on many scientific subjects
| are not replicable nowadays [0], hence my appeal to
| common sense, character, and wisdom. Highly underrated,
| especially on platforms like Hacker News where everything
| you say needs a double blind randomized controlled study.
|
| This point^ should actually be a fundamental factor in
| how we determine truth nowadays. We must reduce our
| reliance on "the science" and go back to the scientific
| method of personal experimentation. Try lying to business
| partner a few times, let's see how that goes.
|
| We can look at specific cases where it holds true- like
| in this case. There may be cases where it doesn't hold
| true. But your own experimentation will show it holds
| true more than not, which is why I'd bet against OpenAI
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Prove what point? There have clearly been crooked or
| underhanded companies that achieved success. Microsoft in
| its early heyday, for example. The fact that they paid a
| price for it doesn't obviate the fact that they still
| managed to become one of the biggest companies in history
| by market cap despite their bad behavior. Heck, what
| about Donald Trump? Hardly anyone in business has their
| crookedness as extensively documented as Trump and he has
| decent odds of being a two-term US President.
|
| What about the guy who repaired my TV once, where it
| worked for literally a single day, and then he 100%
| ghosted me? What was I supposed to do, try to get him
| canceled online? Seems like being a little shady didn't
| manage to do him any harm.
|
| It's not clear to me whether it's usually _worth it_ to
| be underhanded, but it happens frequently enough that I
| 'm not sure the cost is all that high.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I never claimed there have not been crooked or
| underhanded companies that achieved success.
|
| I said I would bet against OpenAI because they're
| untrustworthy and untrustworthiness is not good in the
| long run.
|
| I can add a "usually": like "untrustworthiness is usually
| not good in the long run" if that's your gripe.
| esafak wrote:
| To paraphrase Keynes, we're dead in the long run. Your
| bet may not pay off in your lifetime.
| int_19h wrote:
| Common sense and wisdom indicate that sociopaths win in
| the long run.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| What makes you think MS is trustworthy, the focus on OpenAI and
| the media that spins things drives public opinions
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I said MS is trustworthy?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You should also say for simple games
| thorum wrote:
| There seems to be an ongoing mass exodus of their best talent
| to Anthropic and other startups. Whatever their moat is, that
| has to catch up with them at some point.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| There is no moat. The reality is not only are they bleeding
| talent but the pace of innovation in the space is not
| accelerating and quickly running into scaling constraints.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| The biggest improvements are coming from the diffusion
| models. Image, video, and voice models.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > If you disagree, I would argue you have a very sad view of
| the world, where truth and cooperation are inferior to lies and
| manipulation.
|
| You're holding everyone to a very simple, very binary view with
| this. It's easy to look around and see many untrustworthy
| players in very very long running games whose success lasts
| most of their own lives and often even through their legacy.
|
| That doesn't mean that "lies and manipulation" trump "truth and
| cooperation" in some absolute sense, though. It just means that
| significant long-running games are almost always _very_ multi-
| faceted and the roads that run through them involve many many
| more factors than those.
|
| Those of us who feel most natural being "truthful and
| cooperative" can find great success ourselves while obeying our
| sense of integrity, but we should be careful about
| underestimating those who play differently. They're not
| guaranteed to lose either.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I didn't say they're guaranteed to lose. I said I'd put my
| money on it.
|
| If you put your money otherwise, that's a sad view of the
| world.
| pfisherman wrote:
| The etymological origin of "credit" comes from Latin for
| believe or trust. Credibility is everything in business, and
| you can put a dollar cost on it.
|
| While banditry can work out in the short term; it pretty much
| always ends up the same way. There aren't a lot of old
| gangsters walking around.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| The entire world economy is based on trust. You worked for
| 8 hours today because you trust you'll get money in a week
| that you trust can be used to buy toilet paper at Costco.
|
| There are actually fascinating theories that the origin of
| money is not as a means of replacing a barter system, but
| rather as a way of keeping track who owed favors to each
| other. IOUs, so to speak.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > as a way of keeping track who owed favors to each other
|
| I do not see how that is possible considering I have no
| clue who the second last owner of a cash was before me,
| most of the time.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| the origin of money, vs what money is now, are not
| necessarily one and the same.
| steego wrote:
| That's because you're imagining early paper currency as a
| universal currency.
|
| These early promissory notes were more like coupons that
| were redeemed by the merchants. It didn't matter how many
| times a coupon was traded. As a good merchant, you knew
| how many of your notes you had to redeem because you're
| the one issuing the notes.
| lend000 wrote:
| The problem is that they have no moat, and Sam Altman is no
| visionary. He's clearly been outed as a ruthless opportunist
| whose primary skill is seizing opportunities, not building out
| visionary technical roadmaps. The jury is still out on his
| ability to execute, but things do seem to be falling apart with
| the exit of his top engineering talent.
|
| Compare this to Elon Musk, who has built multiple companies
| with sizable moats, and who has clearly contributed to the
| engineering vision and leadership of his companies. There is no
| comparison. It's unlikely OpenAI would have had anywhere near
| its current success if Elon wasn't involved in the early days
| with funding and organizing the initial roadmap.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >The problem is that they have no moat, and Sam Altman is no
| visionary.
|
| In his defense he is trying to fuck us all by feverishly
| lobbying the US Congress about the fact that "AI is waaay to
| dangerous" for newbs and possibly terrorists to get their
| hands on. If that eventually pays off, then there will be 3-4
| companies that control all of any LLMs that matter.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| > In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.
|
| Amazon and Microsoft seem to be doing really well for
| themselves.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Because they're trustworthy. If you buy a package on Amazon
| or Craigslist, who do you trust to deliver it to your door
| tomorrow? People love the trope that their neighbor is
| trustworthy and the evil big company isn't, but in reality
| it's exactly the other way around. If you buy your heart
| medication you buy it from Bayer or an indie startup?
|
| Big, long lived companies excel at delivering exactly what
| they say they are, and people vote with their wallet on this.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| I don't know if Amazon or Microsoft are trustworthy or not.
|
| But I agree with your point. And it gets very ugly when
| these big institutions suddenly lose trust. They almost
| always deserve it, but it can upend daily life.
| mhuffman wrote:
| >In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.
|
| Telco, cable companies, Nestle, and plenty of others laugh
| while swimming in their sector leading pit of money and
| influence.
| pfisherman wrote:
| Who are you betting on then? Anthropic? Google? Someone else? I
| mean Microsoft was not the friendliest company. But they were
| good enough at serving their customers needs to survive and
| prosper.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| At one end are the chip designers and manufacturers like
| Nvidia. At another end are the end user products like Cursor
| (ChatGPT was actually OpenAI's breakthrough and it was just
| an end-user product innovation. GPT-3.5 models had actually
| already been around)
|
| I would bet on either side, but not in the middle on the
| model providers.
| pfisherman wrote:
| I can see the big chip makers making out like bandits - a
| la Cisco and other infra providers with the rise of the
| internet.
|
| They are facing competition from companies making hardware
| geared toward that inference that I think will push their
| margins down over time.
|
| On the other end of the competitive landscape, what moat do
| those companies have? What is to stop OpenAI from pulling a
| Facebook and Sherlocking the most profitable products built
| on their platform?
|
| Something like Apple developing a chip than can do LLM
| inference on device would completely upend everything.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.
|
| How long is long?
| auggierose wrote:
| > In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.
|
| Is that a wish, or a fact, or just plain wrong? You know that
| just because you want something to be true, it isn't
| necessarily, right?
|
| I wouldn't trust somebody who cannot distinguish between
| wishful thinking and reality.
| lucasyvas wrote:
| I'm also betting against - Meta _alone_ will pass them within
| the year.
| caeril wrote:
| > Sam Altman has proven himself and his company untrustworthy
|
| Did I miss a memo? This is one of the largest [citation needed]
| I've seen on this site in some time. Did he kick a puppy?
| stephencoyner wrote:
| For folks who are skeptical about OpenAI's potential, I think
| Brad Gerstner does a really good job representing the bull case
| for them (his firm Altimeter was a major investor in their recent
| round).
|
| - They reached their current revenue of ~$5B about 2.5 years
| faster than Google and about 4.5 years faster than Facebook
|
| - Their valuation to forward revenue (based on current growth) is
| inline with where Google and Facebook IPO'd
|
| He explains it all much better than I could type -
| https://youtu.be/ePfNAKopT20?si=kX4I-uE0xDeAaWXN&t=80
| qwertox wrote:
| OpenAI would deserve to get dumped by MS. Just like "the boss"
| dumped everyone, including his own principles.
|
| Maybe that's why Sam Altman is so eager to get billions and build
| his own datacenters.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| If Microsoft and OpenAI split up, can't Microsoft keep the
| house, the car, and the kids?
|
| > One particular thing to note is that Brockman stated that
| Microsoft would get access to sell OpenAI's pre-AGI products
| based off of [OpenAI's research] to Microsoft's customers, and
| in the accompanying blog post added that Microsoft and OpenAI
| were "jointly developing new Azure AI supercomputing
| technologies."
|
| > Pre-AGI in this case refers to anything OpenAI has ever
| developed, as it has yet to develop AGI and has yet to get past
| the initial "chatbot" stage of its own 5-level system of
| evaluating artificial intelligence.
|
| Sources to text from https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-
| altman/
| dekhn wrote:
| Microsoft's goal here is to slowly extract every bit of unique ML
| capability out of OpenAI (note the multiple mentions about IP and
| security wrt MSFT employees working with OpenAI) so that they can
| compete with Google to put ML features in their products.
|
| When they know they have all the crown jewels, they will reduce
| then eliminate their support of OpenAI. This was, is, and will be
| a strategic action by Satya.
|
| "Embrace, extend, and extinguish". We're in the second stage now.
| bansheeps wrote:
| I'm calling it right now: there's a Microsoft/OpenAI breakup
| imminent (over ownership, rights, GTM etc) that's going to be
| extremely contested and cause OpenAI to go into a Stability AI
| type tailspin.
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