[ericabiz]

Many years ago, there was an image that floated around with Craigslist and all the websites that replaced small parts of it—personals, for sale ads, etc. It turned out the way to beat Craigslist wasn’t to build Yet Another Monolithic Craigslist, but to chunk it off in pieces and be the best at that piece.

This is analogous to what’s happening with AI models. Sam Altman is saying we have reached the point where spending $100M+ trying to “beat” GPT-4 at everything isn’t the future. The next step is to chunk off a piece of it and turn it into something a particular industry would pay for. We already see small sprouts of those being launched. I think we will see some truly large companies form with this model in the next 5-10 years.

To answer your question, yes, this may be as good as it gets now for monolithic language models. But it is just the beginning of what these models can achieve.

[robocat]

https://www.today.com/money/speculation-craigslist-slowly-dy... from 2011 - is that what you were thinking of? Strange how few of those logos have survived, and how many new logos would now be on it. It would be interesting to see a modernised version.

[The_Colonel]

> Sam Altman is saying we have reached the point where spending $100M+ trying to “beat” GPT-4 at everything isn’t the future.

I don't disagree, but it does align pretty well with the OpenAI business model, no? "No need to develop your own base model, just buy our own"

[swexbe]

Isn't this really bad for OpenAI? Essentially, this means Meta/Google/others will catch up to them pretty soon and there is nothing OpenAI can do in the near future to get further ahead.

[The_Colonel]

That's why he's saying they should just buy OpenAI's base model instead of investing the money to catch up.

[keizo]

I had the thought that many of those services broken off can now be recombined. No one likes having to use 100 saas products imho.