Comment by echelon

5 months ago

Wizard of Oz. There is no magic, it's all smoke and mirrors.

The models and prompts are all monkey-patched and this isn't a step towards general superintelligence. Just hacks.

And once you realize that, you realize that there is no moat for the existing product. Throw some researchers and GPUs together and you too can have the same system.

It wouldn't be so bad for ClopenAI if every company under the sun wasn't also trying to build LLMs and agents and chains of thought. But as it stands, one key insight from one will spread through the entire ecosystem and everyone will have the same capability.

This is all great from the perspective of the user. Unlimited competition and pricing pressure.

7 comments

echelon

Reply
colejohnson66  5 months ago

Quite a few times, the secret sauce for a company is just having enough capital to make it unviable for people to not use you. Then, by the time everyone catches up, you’ve outspent them on the next generation. OpenAI, for example, has spent untold millions on chips/cards from Nvidia. Open models keep catching up, but OpenAI keeps releasing newer stuff.

  • neodymiumphish  5 months ago

    Fortunately, Anthropic is doing an excellent job at matching or beating OpenAI in the user-facing models and pricing.

    I don’t know enough about the technical side to say anything definitive, but I’ve been choosing Claude over ChatGPT for most tasks lately; it always seems to do a better job at helping me work out quick solutions in Python and/or SQL.

    • bossyTeacher  5 months ago

      My main issue with Anthropic is that Amazon is an investor in anthropic. I would rather have far more ethical companies onboard. I know Microsoft is no angel but Amazon seems like the worse one. In my ideal world, Microsoft backs Anthropic and Amazon OpenAi.

sickblastoise  5 months ago

Exactly, things like changing the signature of the api for chat completions are an example. OpenAI is looking for any kind of moat, so they make the api for completions more complicated by including “roles”, which are really just dumb templates for prompts that they try to force you to build around in your program. It’s a race to the bottom and they aren’t going to win because they already got greedy and they don’t have any true advantage in IP.

Ancalagon  5 months ago

I doubt its magic, but how can you be certain it isn't when nobody understands whats going on internally?