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by agentcoops
398 days ago
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I'm not so sure it's desperation. As an alternative hypothesis, we might simply view it as an attempt from a temporary position of strength to secure their tremendous lead as the primary consumer access point to intelligence. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to suggest that this is one of the most important open questions at the moment -- one which will likely be relatively winner-takes-all (in contrast to the more commoditized B2B/API side) and where the winner likely won't be decided based on the intelligence side alone. The questions also aren't entirely separate since the winner, here, will have such incomparably valuable usage data... Unlike most successful startups, OpenAI is not faced with the possibility that the giants (Apple, Google, Microsoft) decide to look their way, but the reality that these are their real competitors and that the stakes are existential for many of them (trends indicating a shift away from search etc). The most likely outcome remains that one if not all of the giants eventually manage to produce a halfway-decent product experience that reduces OpenAI to a B2B player. |
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That makes the presumption that we are currently in a `winner-takes-all` scenario, and I'm not convinced that that is the case.
I'm not sure what the criteria is for a winner-takes-all scenario, but it is not at all evident to me that there is one now, or ever will be.
There is, as everyone says, no actual moat here: Google search had a moat, Windows Desktop had a moat, Apple phones had (and still have) a moat. LLM output currently has no moat, not even performance (both speed and accuracy) because the productivity difference between no-LLM and poor-LLM is about 100x the difference between poor-LLM and good-LLM.
My prediction is that the price of LLM usage will slowly but consistently climb until it reaches the floor on LLM cost-to-suppliers. Right now we are all (myself included) being subsidised by VC money. When the supplier has to actually turn a profit, there's no moat that they can use to keep out newcomers, because the newcomers need only a fraction of the money spent by (for example OpenAI) in order to compete.
Maybe Google has a moat, in that they have everything in-house, from the user-facing product to the tensor-processing hardware? That's as close to a moat that I can think off.