Comment by mikae1
5 months ago
It's clear that progress is incremental at this point. At the same time Anthropic and OpenAI are bleeding money.
It's unclear to me how they'll shift to making money while providing almost no enhanced value.
5 months ago
It's clear that progress is incremental at this point. At the same time Anthropic and OpenAI are bleeding money.
It's unclear to me how they'll shift to making money while providing almost no enhanced value.
Yudkowsky just mentioned that even if LLM progress stopped right here, right now, there are enough fundamental economic changes to provide us a really weird decade. Even with no moat, if the labs are in any way placed to capture a little of the value they've created, they could make high multiples of their investors' money.
Like what economic changes? You can make a case people are 10% more productive in very specific fields (programming, perhaps consultancy etc). That's not really an earthquake, the internet/web was probably way more significant.
LLMs are fundamentally a new paradigm, it just isn't distributed yet.
It's not like the web suddenly was just there, it came slow at first, then everywhere at once, the money came even later.
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It's a force multiplier.
Think of having a secretary, or ten. These secretaries are not as good as an average human at most tasks, but they're good enough for tasks that are easy to double check. You can give them an immense amount of drudgery that would burn out a human.
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Very limited thinking AI is a tool
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It's an echo chamber.
It is - what? - a fifth anniversary of "the world will be a completely different place in 6 months due to AI advancement"?
"Sam Altman believes AI will change the world" - of course he does, what else is he supposed to say?
It is a different place. You just haven't noticed yet.
At some point fairly recently, we passed the point at which things that took longer than anyone thought they would take are happening faster than anyone thought they would happen.
Yep totally agree. It will also depend who captures the most eyeballs.
ChatGPT is already my default first place to check something, where it was Google for the previous 20+ years.
I use it for all kinds of unique things, but ChatGPT is the last place I look for facts.
Eyeballs aren’t enough though. Unlike Google ChatGPT is very expensive to run. It’s unlikely they can just slap ads on it like Google did.
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With no moat, they aren't placed to capture much value; moats are what stops market competition from driving prices to the zero economic profit level, and that's even without further competition from free products that are being produced by people who aren’t even trying to support themselves in the market you are selling into, which can make even the zero economic profit price untenable.
Market competition doesn't work in an instant; even without a moat, there's plenty of money they can capture before it evaporates.
Think pouring water from the faucet into a sink with open drain - if you have high enough flow rate, you can fill the sink faster than it drains. Then, when you turn the faucet off, as the sink is draining, you can still collect plenty of water from it with a cup or a bucket, before the sink fully drains.
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Oh really? How are these changes supposed to look like? Who will pay up essentially? I don't really see it, aside from the m$ business case of offering AI as a guise for violating privacy much harsher to better sell ads.