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by doctorpangloss 851 days ago
I haven't listen to your great podcasts so hard to say what is not covered.

Architectures matter a lot less than data. "Knowledge" and "reasoning" in LLMs is a manifestation of instruct-style data. It won't matter how much cheaper training gets if there is limited instruct data for use cases.

How do you make 100k context window data for example? Still need thousands of people. Same with so-called niches.

Maybe it turns out to be a complex coordination problem to share the data. That's bad for equity investors and giant companies. Anyway, all of this would cost less than the moon landing so it's practicable, you don't need cheaper, you just need risk-taking.

The obviousness of the path from here to there means it's not about innovation. It's all about strategy.

If Google could marshal $10b for Stadia it could spend $10b on generating 100k context window instruct style data and have the best model. It could also synthesize videos from Unity/Unreal for Sora-style generation. It would just be very hard in an org with 100,000+ people to spend $10b on 10 developers and 10,000 writers compared to 400 developers and 3,600 product managers and other egos. At the end of the day you are revisiting the weaknesses that brought Google and other big companies to this mess in the first place.

Anyway I personally think the biggest weakness with ChatGPT and the chat-style UX is that it feels like work. Netflix, TikTok, etc. don't feel like work. Nobody at Google (or OpenAI for that matter) knows how to make stuff that doesn't feel like work. And you can't measure "fun." So the biggest thing to figure out is how much technical stuff matters in a world where people can be poached here and there and walk out with the whole architecture in their heads, versus the non-technical stuff that takes decades of hard-worn personal experiences and strongly held opinions like answers to questions "How do you make AI fun?"

1 comments

> "How do you make AI fun?"

Bring back text-based adventure games.

People go for this level of obviousness and it doesn't work. I have no doubt that a meme text game will find some level of literal objective success. But it will still suck. Meme games are a terrible business, both in terms of profits and equity.

This also speaks to why OpenAI, Google and the other developers will struggle to create anything that feels like fun: they will chase obvious stuff like this, they will think its similar to all problems. And in reality, you don't need any testing or data or whatever to know that people hate reading in video games, the best video game writing is worse than the average movie's screenplay, that most dialogue is extremely tedious, so why are you going to try to make it even worse by making it generated by an AI?