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Comment by throw14082020

1 year ago

This is really helpful, thanks!

OpenAI hired the ex fractional CTO of LiveKit, who created Pion, a popular WebRTC library/tool.

I'd expect OpenAI to migrate off of LiveKit within 6 months. LiveKit is too expensive. Also, WebRTC is hard, and OpenAI now being a less open company will want to keep improvements to itself.

Not affiliated with any competitors, but I did work at a PaaS company similar to LiveKit but used Websockets instead.

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throw14082020

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fidotron  1 year ago

> LiveKit is too expensive

Most of it is open source, especially the clients, although they do feel quite ad hoc hacked together (a possible side effect of WebRTC evolution).

Would totally agree on OpenAI moving away. The description of the agent here sounds like a big hack just to get around the fact temporarily the model server expects audio over sockets instead.

  • russ  1 year ago

    Which components feel ad hoc?

    In most real applications, the agent has additional logic (function calling, RAG, etc) than simply relaying a stream to the model server. In those cases, you want it to be a separate service/component that can be independently scaled.

    • fidotron  1 year ago

      Essentially I think the Livekit value is a SFU that works, with signalling, and the SDKs exist. My experience is people radically overstate how hard signalling is, and underestimate SFU complexity, especially with fast failover.

      In terms of being a higher level API arguably it is doomed to failure, thanks to the madness of the domain. (The part that sticks in my mind is audio device switching on Android.) WebRTC products seem to always end up with the consumer needing to know way more of the internals than is healthy. As such I think once you are sufficiently good at using LiveKit you are less likely to pick it for your next product because you will be able to roll your own far more easily. That is unless the value you were getting from it actually was the SFU infrastructure and not the SDKs.

      The OpenAI case is so point-to-point that doing WebRTC for that is, honestly, really not hard at all.

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