This point is understated. So many people are going around like "I'm building an AI app!" when the reality is, OpenAI built an AI app, you're just designing a front end for it.
The design of abstractions, prompt engineering, custom fine-tunes and software engineering required to ship a valuable application on top of that interface counts as "building an app" in my book.
https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/docs/generative-ai/models...
You can generate the training data for this with 3.5 and 4 and tune smaller models with the resulting data. For lots of tasks, this results in robust results, which btw are also faster than 3.5 turbo.
I don’t think OpenAI’s contribution should be so understated- they built a technology that was considered science fiction just a few years ago. They deserve all the credit for the “AI”.
We can now write software that interprets language under the hood (to some degree). The value propositions enabled by this change in the world are so vast, and partly so complex - to make absolute statements like "yeah but you don't control the model, so anyone can copy your solution" seems out of touch to me. What subset of technology doesn't get reverse engineered? Either this applies almost nowhere (because every piece of tech that an engineer can get their hands on is effectively open), or everywhere.
I would also add "distribution" to the "app and UX" part, but you can certainly build a valuable business upon an API "everyone else has access to" - plenty of companies out there that do that.
[0]https://twitter.com/englishpaulm/status/1623701758781558784
That doesn't mean that everything else in the stack is window dressing though - custom, domain specific wrangling with the different api endpoints, finding a satisfying prompt, temperature param etc. for specific tasks - the entire process of designing systems around an LLM-api has many intricacies to it, lots of which are completely uncharted territory.
I can assure you: very smart people are knees deep in this process, and they deserve the credit for their share of the value that is being created.
However, the "very very temporary space" might as well lead to momentum and a moat in a subdomain, and anyone who met a sufficiently large number of smart people knows that lots of them are very pragmatic, don't chase prestige, and enjoy laying ground work for future iterations.
So I have to believe that the people making these products are intending to make as much cash as possible up front and aren't aiming for a long-term thing.
It's certainly building an app. It's not building an AI app, though. It's building a front-end to an existing AI application.
Replace social media / graph APIs with the ones from OpenAI
Depending on your business case, the 4096 tokens given to you have to go quite far. Vector embeddings are not "easy" to work with. Trying to splat together a range of techniques to craft a good prompt is hard™.
Adding in Actions (e.g. using headless browsers to open pages etc) is also pioneering territory.
Sucks that OpenAI currently has the market, but there is still plenty of reasons to develop on top of it.
The technology is just GPT and transformers, the open source alternatives are just not as advanced as the GPT4 model yet. It might change with current trajectory, mainly because OpenAI keeps nerfing it.