Unless I'm misunderstanding, doesn't OpenAI have a very vested interest to keep making their products so good/so complex/so large that consumer hobbyists can't just `git clone` an alternative that's 95% as good running locally?
Meta is already capable of monetizing content generated by the models: these models complement their business and they could not care less which model you're using to earn them advertising dollars, as long as you keep the (preferably high quality) content coming.
At which point the new underdogs would have an interest in doing to them what they're doing to OpenAI.
Assuming progress for LLMs continues at a rapid pace for an extended period of time. It's not implausible that they'll get to a certain level past which non-trivial progress is hard, and if there is an open source model at that level there isn't going to be a moat.
There’s none. Which is why Sam Altman has been crying wolf, in hope of regulatory barriers which can provide it the moat.
From what I understand, if you take the absolute best cutting edge LLM with the most parameters and the most up to date model from GitHub/HuggingFace/whatever, it's very far off from the output you get from GPT-3.5 / GPT-4
aka full of hallucinations, not very useful
I don't know if this is the right way to look at it but if what George Hotz said about GPT-4 simply being "8 220B parameter models glued together by something called a mixture-of-experts", from what I understand, OpenAI's moat is:
their access/subsidiized cost to GPUs/infrastructure with Microsoft
the 8 220B models they have are really good/I don't think anything open source matches them/nobody can download "all of Reddit/Twitter/Wikipedia/StackOverflow/whatever else they trained on" anymore like they could given how everybody wants to protect/monetize their content now
and then the "router" / "MoE" piece seems to be something missing from open source offerings as well
Other benchmarks/anecdotes suggest fine-tuned code models are outperforming GPT4 too. The trend seems to be that smaller, fine-tuned task specific models outperform larger generalised models. It requires a lot of resources to pretrain the base model, but as we’ve seen, there’s no shortage of companies who are willing and able to do that.
Not to mention, all those other companies are already profitable, whereas OpenAI is already burning investor cash.
Although see last week for previous responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37333747
Here’s another way to think about it. Why does ISA matter in CPUs? There are minor issues around efficiencies of various kinds, but the real advantage of any mainstream ISA is, in part, the availability of tooling (hence this was a correct and heavy early focus for the RISCV effort) but also a lot of ecosystem things you don’t see: for example, Intel and Arm have truly mammoth test and verification suites that represent thousands++ of man years of investment.
OpenAI almost certainly has a massive invisible accumulated value at this point.
The actual models themselves are the output in the same way that a packaged CPU is the output. How you got there matters almost as much or more.
Honestly the answer is that it mostly doesn't.
An ISA isn't viable without tooling, but that's why it's the first thing they all get. The only ISA with any significant moat is x86, and that's because there is so much legacy closed source software for it that people still need but would have to be emulated on any other architecture. And even that only works as long as x86 processors are competitive; if they fell behind then customers would just eat the emulation overhead on something else.
Other ISAs don't even have that. Would anybody actually be surprised if RISC-V took a huge chunk of out ARM's market share in the not too distant future?
The magic of openai is their training data and architecture.
There is a real risk that a model gets leaked.
You would need to steal it all over again as soon as the next model is trained.
startup as legal entity has close to 0 value, most value is in intellectual property which is stored and transmitted by meatbags.