I have trouble believing this isn't just a sneaky marketing campaign.
If this was an extremely competitive market that'd be more plausible. But they enjoy some pretty serious dominance and are struggling to handle the growth they already have with GPT.
If Q* is real, you likely wouldn't need to hype up something that has the potential to solve math / logic problems without having seen the problem/solution before hand. Something that novel would be hugely valuable and generate demand naturally.
What is that though? I've seen a lot of tools created for it. Custom AI Characters. Things that let you have an LLM read a DB etc. But I haven't much in regards to customer facing things.
How about ChatGPT? It’s a game changer. It has allowed me to learn Rust extremely quickly since I can just ask it direct questions about my code. And I don’t worry about hallucinations since the compiler is always there to “fact check”.
I’m pretty bearish on OpenAI wrappers. Low effort, zero moat. But that’s largely irrelevant to the value of OpenAI products themselves.
I was asking today about polars, and it hallucinated all answers..
How is this helpful?
Where it is helpful is that it's way more convenient than asking a human, doing a web search, or looking it up in a book. Even if a followup question is required. In this particular case there is a lot of transferability between knowing programming languages, too, so one can filter most implausible answers even if they don't know the programming language they are asking about.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-has-over-a-million-p...
For the most part usages of GenAI have been sharing output on social media. It is mind-blowingly fascinating, but the utility of it is far far behind.
Remember Altman saying that they shouldn't release GPT-2 because of it being too dangerous? It's the same thing with this Q* thing.
And to set a precedent that models should be released cautiously, and he was right about that too, and it is to our detriment that we don't take that more seriously.
Why?
edit: You know what, let's take a concrete issue that could happen today. You've made a generative image network. Five weeks after releasing it on Huggingface, you discover to your chagrin that the dataset that you used to train it contains an astonishing amount of child pornography, something like 1%. Your spot checks didn't find this because it's all in a subfolder that you forgot to check. Who knew it wasn't a good idea to download datasets from 4chan? As a result, this network is now extremely good at generating images of children in sexual situations, and because of mode collapse, it's creating fake images of real children, something which all but the most libertarian consider morally abhorrent. At any rate, you consider this morally abhorrent, and you'd love to work with the police to prevent any further misuse. Unfortunately, your network has been downloaded at least ten thousand times and it has already been fine-tuned to be even better at child porn by the nice folks at <insert dubious discord here>. Now you have an appointment with a senator in three days, and you have to explain to her why you thought it was a good idea to publish this network for open download, even though you could have made way more money by keeping it closed. Good luck?
Now of course you can argue that in this case all the material was already out there. But that doesn't change the fact that you were the one who did the training run, and released the network, and you're the reason why perceptual hashes now won't find collisions on the generated pictures anymore. If there was a limited amount of generated images in circulation, you could just take the API down, apologize profusely, donate 10k to RAINN or whatever and restart your project under a new name. But as it is, that option is no longer available. The point is, we don't know what a network is doing, and so we don't know what it's going to do in the wild. We cannot prove the absence of capability, so we should hedge our bets.
Company’s have competing interests and personalities. That’s normal. But there is no indication that GPT was held back for marketing.