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Comment by strangattractor | Hacker News Reader

Good thing he got a bunch of companies to pony up the dough for LLM before he announced they where already over.

I don't think LLMs are over [0]. I think we're relatively close to a local optimum in terms of what can be achieved with current algorithms. But I think OpenAI is at least as likely as any other player to create the next paradigm, and that it's at least as likely as likely as any other player to develop the leading models within the next paradigm regardless of who actually publishes the research.

Separately, I think OpenAI's current investors have a >10% chance to hit the 100x cap on their returns. Their current models are already good enough to address lots of real-world problems that people will pay money to solve. So far they've been much more model-focused than product-focused, and by turning that dial toward the product side (as they did with ChatGPT) I think they could generate a lot of revenue relatively quickly.

[0] Except maybe in the sense that future models will be predominantly multimodal and therefore not strictly LLMs. I don't think that's what you're suggesting though.

It already is relatively trivial to fine-tune generative models for various use cases. Which implies huge gains to be had with targeted applications not just for niche players but also OpenAI and others to either build that fine-tuning into the base system, build ecosystems around it, or just purpose build applications on top.

I think it's more exciting if compute stops being the core differentiation, as purpose trained models is exactly where I suspect real value lies.

Especially as a differentiation for a company. If everyone is using ChatGPT, then they're all offering the same thing and I can just as well go to the source and cut out the middleman.

The other fun development to come is well performing self hosted models, and the idea of light weight domain specific interface models that curate responses from bigger generalist models.

ChatGPT is fun but it is very general, it doesn't know about my business nor keep track of it or interface with it. I fully expect to see "Expert Systems" of old come back, but trained on our specific businesses.

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