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by Topfi 1088 days ago
I am sure most at OpenAI realize that they don't have a moat[0] that will keep them ahead for an extended period of time. Being a first mover does have its advantages of course, funding and resources from MSFT also help, but if they continue to (temporarily) take away features from their paying customers, are not forthcoming with whether there have been changes to in-use models and generally make it hard to rely on and trust them to deliver a consistent service, that will further people looking for alternatives, be that other competitors[1] or local models[2]. Unless they can capture regulators in ways that would make local models impossible, they have a very narrow time window to retain a large section of the market in the medium term.

Despite their best efforts at presenting themselves as the "ethical" ones in this industry and attempts to convince governments that open/local models must be regulated[3], the only way I can see them accomplishing longer term limits on local LLMs considering the many purposes GPUs and inference accelerators can serve to the public will be hard. I have said this before, but I view this similarly to the Crypto Wars[4] or more recently Nvidia LHR[5].

I can see a Clipper Chip[6] for GPUs, that tries to limit inference to features approved for the common public, (mainly gaming focused applications like DLSS) in the near future, but I am certain that like before, where there is a 10ft wall, 12ft ladders will emerge.

Basically, OpenAI must prove able to provide a consistent service to their paying customers. Do not make changes to models in production, do not take away features, if something is down provide a timeline and deprecate or replace models in a transparent manner. When the switch from the "initial" ChatGPT model to "gpt-3.5-turbo" happened, there was a lot of confusion that could have been avoided with more transparency from the outset.

[0] https://archive.is/ImFl2

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/

[2] https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

[5] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2021/05/18/lhr/

[6] https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/usa/clipper.htm