I've got to wonder, how does a second player in the LLM space even get on the board?
Like, this feels a lot like when the iPhone jumped out to grab the lion share of mobile. But the switching costs was much smaller (end users could just go out and buy an Android phone), and network effects much weaker (synergy with iTunes and the famous blue bubbles... and that's about it). Here it feels like a lot of the value is embedded in the business relationships OpenAI's building up, which seem _much_ more difficult to dislodge, even if others catch up from a capabilities perspective.
It reminds me of what went down with Netflix. At first, it looked like you only needed one subscription to watch everything, but now that other players have entered the market, with their own bussiness contacts we're seeing ecosystems fracture.
For example, Microsoft is collecting data from services A, B, and C, while Google is gathering data from X, Y, and Z. And when it comes to language models, you might use GPT for some tasks and Llama or Bard for others. It seems like the fight ahead won't be about technology, but rather about who has access to the most useful dataset.
Personally, I also think we'll see competitors trying to take legal action against each other soon.
1) Not every use cases will require the full power and (probably) considerable cost of chat GPT-4.
2) some companies can absolutely not use OpenAI tools simply because they are American and online. A competitor might emerge to capture that market and be allowed to grow to be "good enough"
3) some "countries" (think China or EU(who am I Kidding)) will limit their growth until local alternatives are available. Ground breaking technology have a tendency to spread globally and the current state of the art is not that expensive (we are talking single digit billions once)
Google have really been caught with their pants down here.
Remember that OpenAI was created specifically to stave off the threat of AI monopolization by Google (or anyone else - but at the time Google).
DeepMind have done some interesting stuff with Go, Protein folding etc, but nothing really commercial, nor addressing their reason d'etre of AGI.
Google's just-released ChatGPT competitor, Bard, seems surprisingly weak, and meantime OpenAI are just widening their lead. Seems like a case of the small nimble startup running circles around the big corporate behemoth.
OpenAI went all in on generative models, i.e. stable diffusion and large language models. DeepMind focused on reinforcement learning, tree search, plus alphafold approaches to biology. FAIR has translation, pytorch, and some LLM stuff in biology.
What OpenAI is missing though is any AI research in biology, but I bet they are working on it.
I'm not sure if this makes sense but OpenAI seems to be operating at a higher level of abstraction (AGI) where they are integrating modalities (text and image modality for now, probably speech next) vs the other places have taken a more focused applied approach.
How about training data from interactions just by sheer usage numbers? Google does not have that.
There is a reason why the quality of ChatGPT responses are better. RLHF.I am not sure though how Google can be 3x better than OpenAI to make user switch now. They are so slow, they should be the one building the plugins.
Like, this feels a lot like when the iPhone jumped out to grab the lion share of mobile. But the switching costs was much smaller (end users could just go out and buy an Android phone), and network effects much weaker (synergy with iTunes and the famous blue bubbles... and that's about it). Here it feels like a lot of the value is embedded in the business relationships OpenAI's building up, which seem _much_ more difficult to dislodge, even if others catch up from a capabilities perspective.