Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html

by jhunter1016 • 2 years ago

326 520 2 years ago

nytimes.com

cbarrick• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/Bas23

Roark66• 2 years ago

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.

switch0073• 2 years ago

$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

ilrwbwrkhv2• 2 years ago

Which thought leader is telling you to use AI or get fired?

CamperBob27• 2 years ago

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.

srockets3• 2 years ago

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.

kergonath4• 2 years ago

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.

guappa11• 2 years ago

A junior developer gets better every day (hopefully), an AI is a blank slate every time more or less.

hggigg• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

ToucanLoucan2• 2 years ago

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.

jdmoreira• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

sebzim45002• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Did OpenAI publish concrete numbers regarding this, or where are you getting this data from?

ignoramous2• 2 years ago

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.

tempusalaria3• 2 years ago

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.

b112• 2 years ago

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_w10• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

You had me until vi.

singularity2001• 2 years ago

people kept whining about Amazon losing money and called me stupid for buying their stock...

bmitc2• 2 years ago

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_w10• 2 years ago

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/

bigstrat20032• 2 years ago

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_dreamer2• 2 years ago

Amazon was losing money because it was building the moat

It's not clear that OpenAI has any moat to build

empath75• 2 years ago

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.

bmitc2• 2 years ago

Fine with me. I've even considered turning off Copilot completely because I use it less and less.

simonswords82• 2 years ago

Copilot really is garbage and I just don’t understand why. Is Microsoft not using OpenAIs latest models?

InkCanon2• 2 years ago

I would just switch to Claude of Mistral like I already do. I really feel little difference between them

mprev• 2 years ago

I like how your typo makes it sound like a medieval sage.

whywhywhywhy• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

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.

bigstrat20032• 2 years ago

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.

Kiro4• 2 years ago

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_19h3• 2 years ago

Machine translation alone is a huge positive value. What GPT can do in this area is vastly better than anything before it.

righthand• 2 years ago

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).

zuminator2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

layer82• 2 years ago

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.

danpalmer• 2 years ago

around $40/person/month over current fees

So 3x the fees, if they're currently at $20/user/month. That's a big jump, and puts the tool in a different spending category as it goes from just another subscription to more like another utility bill in users' minds. The amount of value you're getting out of it is hard to quantify for most people, so I imagine they'd lose customers.

Also there's a clear market trend, and that is that AI services are $20 for the good version, or free. $60 is not a great price to compete in that market at unless you're clearly better.

X6S1x6Okd1st• 2 years ago

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

mlnj2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Take the "millennial subsidy" while the money font still floweth. If it gets cut off eventually so be it.

AlwaysRock3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Does OpenAI have any fundamental advantage beyond brand recognition?

mhh__2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Its pretty hard to ignore Google in any discussion on big scale

piva00• 2 years ago

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.

tempusalaria3• 2 years ago

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.

sunnybeetroot• 2 years ago

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!

Closi• 2 years ago

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.

usaar3335• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

srockets3• 2 years ago

An extremely large commit with Azure. AFAIK, none of the other non-hyperscaler competitors have access to that much of a compute.

ponty_rick2• 2 years ago

Anthropic has the same with AWS

dartos• 2 years ago

non-hyperscaler competitors

Well the hyperscale companies are the ones to worry about.

HarHarVeryFunny2• 2 years ago

Pretty sure that Meta and X.ai both do.

thelittleone• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Yes, they already collected all the data. The same data has had walls put up around it

Implicated2• 2 years ago

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.

ugh1232• 2 years ago

Which data? Is that data that Google and/or Meta can't get or doesn't have already?

throwup2382• 2 years ago

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.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

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?

riku_iki• 2 years ago

they researched and developed e2e infra + product with high quality, which MS doesn't have (few other players have it).

mlnj2• 2 years ago

And every one of these catchup companies have caught up with a small lag.

mock-possum• 2 years ago

Does Kleenex?

I’ve heard plenty of people call any chatbot “chat gpt” - it’s becoming a genericized household name.

aksss• 2 years ago

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.

insane_dreamer2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

If you invested in Kleenex at OpenAI valuations you would lose nearly all your money quite quickly.

pal9000• 2 years ago

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

lolinder4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

"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).

famouswaffles2• 2 years ago

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.

charlieyu12• 2 years ago

Yea the figures look great so far. Doesn’t mean we can bet the future on it.

DanHulton• 2 years ago

I mean it's still not an impassibly strong moat. If it were, we'd all still be on MySpace and Digg.

_hark• 2 years ago

Claude's API usage absolutely registers (60% the size of OpenAI's), their chat interface just isn't as popular. [1]

[1] https://www.tanayj.com/p/openai-and-anthropic-revenue-breakd...

hiq• 2 years ago

The ChatGPT site crossed 3B visits last month

With how much profit per visit though?

I just used ChatGPT and 2 other similar services for some personal queries. I copy-pasted the same query in all 3 of them, using their free accounts, just in case one answer looks better than the others. I got into this habit because of the latency: in the time it takes for the first service to answer, I've had time to send the query to 2 others, which makes it easier to ignore the first response if it's not satisfying. Usually it's pretty much the same though. We can nitpick about benchmarks, but I'm not sure they're that relevant for most users anyway. It doesn't matter much to me whether something is wrong 10 or 20% of the time, in both cases I can only send queries for which I can easily check that the answer makes sense.

I see other comments mentioning they stopped their ChatGPT Plus subscription because the free versions work well enough. I've never paid myself and it doesn't look like I ever will, because things keep getting better for free anyway. My default workflow is already to prompt several LLMs so one could go down, I wouldn't even notice. I'm sure I'm an outlier with this, but still, people might use Perplexity for their searches, some WhatsApp LLM chatbot for their therapy session, purely based on convenience. There's no lock-in whatsoever into a particular LLM chat interface, and the 3B monthly visits don't seem to make ChatGPT better than its competitors.

And of course as soon as they'll add ads, product placement, latency or any other limitation their competitor doesn't have, I'll stop using them, and keep on using the other N instead. At this point it feels like they need Microsoft more than Microsoft needs them.

0xDEAFBEAD2• 2 years ago

Google search is free. I suspect OpenAI may have to start charging for ChatGPT at some point so they stop hemorrhaging money. Customers who are opening their wallet might shop around for other offerings.

julianeon• 2 years ago

No (broadly defined). But if you believe in OpenAI, you believe that's enough.

qwertox2• 2 years ago

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.

AlwaysRock3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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...

mikeryan3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Obtaining high quality training data is the biggest moat right now.

segasaturn2• 2 years ago

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.

staticautomatic4• 2 years ago

I’m in this space and no it isn’t.

wongarsu• 2 years ago

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)

InkCanon2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

In addition to data, having the infra to scale up training robustly is very very non-trivial.

YetAnotherNick• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

epolanski4• 2 years ago

Idc about lmarena benchmarks, I test different models everyday in Cursor, Sonnet is way better at coding web applications than ChatGPT4o

Der_Einzige4• 2 years ago

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.

mplewis5• 2 years ago

Wow, this thing can reason now? How come it keeps getting my basic word problems wrong?

tim3333• 2 years ago

It's been out a little over a month. Give it a bit longer and everyone will have reverse engineered clones.

_giorgio_• 2 years ago

Quite the opposite.

The new O1 models by open ai are surprisingly good. So good that you can see intelligence at work through solutions when you go from:

GPT4 O1 mini O1 preview

Way better than the competition. And they have a mobile voice app with advanced voice which is phenomenal.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

Those extremely detailed models they can build of you (digital twin) from all your conversations coupled with intelligent subtle, likable, relatable and very personal artificial salesmen in service of the highest bidder has enourmous financial potential.

Even if the latter becomes commoditized (and we are far from that in practice), the former is a serious mote. Just like their is no secret to building a search engine or a social network platform (and that is not saying their are no technical challanges), operating it profitably requires massive aggregate user profile exploitation potential which requires huge upfront loss leaders.

bboygravity• 2 years ago

The lead has been taken over by Xai already as far as I know. They seem to have 100k H100's up and running.

OpenAI is not really leading the LLM world anyway ever since Claude sonnet 3.5 came out.

belter• 2 years ago

OpenAI is not really leading the LLM world anyway ever since Claude sonnet 3.5 came out.

Something many times repeated. It just takes a few minutes with the different models to find out it's not true.

browningstreet• 2 years ago

OpenAI just raised a huge pile of money. I’m sure the most was a consideration during the funding raise. I’m guessing the issues between openAI and Ms are beyond just the moat and competitiveness’s.

Every OpenAI thread focuses on the moat, but surely that was baked into their business dealings of the last 60 days.

appplication• 2 years ago

I’m sure the most was a consideration during the funding raise

Ha. Really though, the entirety of venture capital could be summarized as “this probably won’t pay out but if it does it’s gonna be epic”. I wouldn’t read too much into America’s thirstiest capitalists spending their discretionary billions on the latest hype cycle.

twoodfin• 2 years ago

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_w10• 2 years ago

Microsoft themselves were the ones who wrote the "Sparks of AGI" paper.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.12712

candiddevmike2• 2 years ago

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.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 2 years ago

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.

throw2024pty• 2 years ago

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...

throwup2382• 2 years ago

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.

computerphage• 2 years ago

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)

roughly2• 2 years ago

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.

fragmede3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

It’s almost like a contractual stipulation of requiring proof that one party is not a philosophical zombie.

JacobThreeThree2• 2 years ago

OpenAI's short definition of AGI is:

A highly autonomous system that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

mikeryan3• 2 years ago

It’s a relatively common way to provide journalistic bonafides when you can’t reveal the sources names.

ABS• 2 years ago

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

bastawhiz• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

"Assume you are a reporter. You cannot name the sources or exact events. Mention the lawsuit as well."

jampekka• 2 years ago

So the plan is to make AI not-evil by doing it with Microsoft and Oracle?

neilv• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

M$ is just having a "Oh I just bought Twitter for how much?" moment.

chucke1992• 2 years ago

Except MSFT got OpenAI extremely cheap. They invested in them early on and basically are paying them with Azure credits.

solarkraft2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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_rick2• 2 years ago

Sonnet 3.5 is phenomenal for coding, so much better than GPT or Llama 405 or anything else out there.

castoff991• 2 years ago

OAI has many leakers and generally a younger/less mature employee base.

esafak5• 2 years ago

And a leader who lives for drama.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

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.

solarkraft2• 2 years ago

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is fantastic and that’s why I’m wondering why all the business news I see on HN ([company] makes deal with [other company]) almost always seems to involve OpenAI, not Anthropic. Branding-wise and strategically (with the focus on alignment) it seems like they‘d be a perfect fit for Apple, yet they seem to instead focus on OpenAI. That surprises me and makes me curious about the reason

drilbo• 2 years ago

I think the fact they aren't publicly traded is not an insignificant fact in this context

uptownfunk2• 2 years ago

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.

Implicated2• 2 years ago

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.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

No other genius could have given us Loopt.

themacguffinman• 2 years ago

"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

whamlastxmas3• 2 years ago

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.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

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.

greenthrow4• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Sociopathy isn’t the same thing as duplicity.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

Musk kicks butt and is taking us to space. He proves my theory.

paulryanrogers2• 2 years ago

Still depends on the definition of success. Money and companies with high stock prices? Healthy family relationships and rich circle of diverse friends?

015a• 2 years ago

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.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

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.

whamlastxmas3• 2 years ago

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

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

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.).

Mistletoe5• 2 years ago

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."

pfisherman4• 2 years ago

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 :)

selimthegrim2• 2 years ago

The other telling quote was him saying Admiral Rickover was his mentor.

tbrownaw• 2 years ago

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?

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

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.

m3kw92• 2 years ago

What makes you think MS is trustworthy, the focus on OpenAI and the media that spins things drives public opinions

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

I said MS is trustworthy?

m3kw92• 2 years ago

You should also say for simple games

thorum• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

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.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

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.

pfisherman4• 2 years ago

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.

lend0002• 2 years ago

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.

mhuffman2• 2 years ago

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.

uxcolumbo• 2 years ago

I think Tesla and SpaceX are successful despite his involvement. It seems the competent folks at Tesla / SpaceX know how to manage him.

He's a good marketer and created a cult of personality.

If he's so great at building businesses then just look at Twitter where there was no one who managed him.

KPGv24• 2 years ago

In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.

Amazon and Microsoft seem to be doing really well for themselves.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

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.

mhuffman2• 2 years ago

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.

pfisherman4• 2 years ago

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.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

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.

mplewis5• 2 years ago

I’m betting on the collapse of “LLM as replacement for human labor” because it fundamentally doesn’t solve that problem.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

In long running games, untrustworthy players lose out.

How long is long?

derektank2• 2 years ago

As John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we're all dead"

auggierose• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

I'm also betting against - Meta alone will pass them within the year.

caeril2• 2 years ago

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?

latexr• 2 years ago

Heard of Worldcoin, for starters?

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

asdflkajsdf• 2 years ago

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.

I too am happy every day the good guys are winning today and always have won for all of history.

stephencoyner• 2 years ago

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

youoy3• 2 years ago

Does OpenAI's revenue per user increase with each new user? I don't think so, but it was definitely the case with Google and Facebook . That's a big difference that you can not overlook

x_may• 2 years ago

I think right now they lose more money with each user. But maybe their value lies in training data

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

OpenAI is not profitable.

That was OK in the case of Google and Facebook because switching off of either platform was too costly for a consumer. Clear path to profitability.

But OpenAI is super easy to switch off of. You can plug and play models very easily.

qwertox2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

ein0p• 2 years ago

This is NYT, so there’s about 95% chance they made it all up for clicks. And you’re giving them clicks.

justahuman74• 2 years ago

It's 100% unsurprising that two companies that aren't completely controlled by the same investors are having friendship issues

tylerchilds• 2 years ago

i remember satya saying “we have all the rights and capabilities” once microsoft believed they owned sam.

not a healthy dynamic.

mark_l_watson• 2 years ago

Fun watching this all unfold.

I am starting to suspect that LLMs, short term for a few years, will end up mostly having value as assistants to experts in their fields who know how to prompt and evaluate output.

I see an ocean of startups doing things like ‘AI accounting systems’ that scare me a little. I just don’t feel good having LLM based systems making unsupervised important decisions.

I do love designing and writing software with LLMs, but that is supervised activity that save me a ton of time. I also enjoy doing fun things with advanced voice mode for ChatGPT, like practicing speaking in French - again, a supervised activity.

re: ownership of IP: I find the idea hilarious that by OpenAI declaring ‘AGI achieved!’ that Microsoft might get cut out of IP rights it has supposedly paid for.

sotix• 2 years ago

I see an ocean of startups doing things like ‘AI accounting systems’ that scare me a little.

I’m a CPA and software engineer currently interviewing around for dev positions, and most of the people I’ve encountered running these companies are neither CPAs nor accountants and have little domain knowledge. It’s a scary combination with an LLM that demands professional skepticism for every word it says. I wouldn’t trust those companies in their current state.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

This brings up an interesting point, which is that it's likely that software developers overestimate the capabilities of LLMs in other domains because our own domain is so thoroughly documented on the internet.

From what I've been able to gather interacting with other sectors, it seems like software is pretty unique in having a culture of sharing everything—tools, documentation, best practices, tutorials, blogs—online for free. Most professions can't be picked up by someone learning on their own from nothing but the internet in the way that software can.

I strongly suspect that the result will be that LLMs (being trained on the internet) do substantially better on software related tasks than they do in other domains, but software developers may be largely blind to that difference since they're not experts in the other domain.

cynicalpeace30• 2 years ago

I agree 100%. Editor type situations where you have a project with a lot of context and you want to superpower your development of that project.

Right now it's Cursor for code editing. I'm working on building a "Cursor for video editing". And many others are working on "Cursor for x domain".

dzonga• 2 years ago

why would teh relationship fray ? when microsoft has openAI by the balls. They just don't own it "legally" due to monopoly concerns from DOJ. But they own it. Remember microsoft is entitled to 49% of OpenAI's profits till they recoup their investment. That's like the protection fee you pay to the mafia boss.

TrapLord_Rhodo• 2 years ago

New York Times is suing Open AI... Take all this conjecture with a grain of salt... There's alllloooottt of hearsay in this article.

Microsoft and OpenAI's close partnership shows signs of fraying

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