I guess it has a cost, though? I presume OpenAI didn’t like this move. If that’s the case, what might be the consequences?
Until OpenAI releases GPT 5 and it blows everyone away, OpenAI's leverage is constantly decreasing as the gap between their best model and everyone else's best model decreases.
There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance.
Maybe someone should as ChatGPT what OpenAI should do to maintain long-term leadership in this industry?
Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he can.
Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out.
Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to original content creators, approximately solve the content ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the rev share in proportion to their data importance to the model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions against LLM firms.
Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data from poisoned models. With the content creators united behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data.
And when such models become popular[0], all the artists now have no job and no way to get compensation for being unable to work through no fault of their own.
I don't think that's really a winning condition. It might make you feel better about the world, but the end result is still all the artists being out of work.
[0] some models are already trained that way, although I assume you're using the word "copyrighted" in the conventional sense of "neither public domain nor an open license", as e.g. all my MIT licensed stuff is still copyrighted but it's fine to use.
There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works.
> There is still also money to be made in producing physical art or performances, even when AI can produce amazing digital works.
Perhaps, but it may be akin to the way there is still money to be made from horse drawn carriages in city centres, even when cars displaced them over a century ago — a rare treat for special occasions, to demonstrate wealth.
Is it not the same with every leap in technology? There were professions like street lamp lighters, alarm services etc that have become redundant now?
More specifically, I was responding to the idea that "compensating creators whose works are used to train the models" would actually solve anything; to use your examples, it would be as if the literal luddites were suggesting passing laws saying that "all textile machines that work like humans need to compensate the humans they displace, and also you need to make your new machines from scratch without talking to any textile workers to make sure you don't cheat", and my response would be analogous to saying "there's already machines which don't work like humans, so you're going to be out of work and have no compensation".
The Luddite movement preceded The Communist Manifesto by about 30 years. Everything's sped up since then, so I'd be surprised if we have to wait 30 years for a political shift which is to AI what Communism was to industrialisation. I'm just hoping we don't get someone analogous to Stalin or Pol Pot this time.
I've thought the same thing. NVIDIA getting into AI seriously is a vertical integration play and they often do that -- like NVIDIA trying to buy ARM.
Well, they didn't stop selling GPU when cryptomining was going strong. Instead they continued to sell them (with a hefty markup, tho).
It's like selling shovels and picks during a gold rush.
do runs of cards for themselves with higher core counts and clock speed that they dont release to others.
Hard disagree. OpenAI's function calling is something no other commercial model provides, not even Gemini and Mistral Large.
Those integrated AI solutions will usually be done via enterprise deals where brand name is not quite as important. It will be done by people who care about cost, reliability and ease of use.
Think of nginx's dominance in web servers even though it has no name recognition among the general population. Or Stripe's payment system.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/15/no-gpt-trademark-for-opena...
And when I was a kid, it seemed like all the teachers thought it would be a waste of time to learn MacOS because "Apple would be bankrupt soon". (Given how much all the app UIs changed, right decision for the wrong reason).
They might, in an upside-down world where the Shockley Semiconductor board tried to fire Shockley, and where the Traitorous Eight not only didn't bail out but took his side.
And then OpenAI tripped and fell over a magic money printing factory, and the complaints are now in the set ["it's just a stochastic parrot", "it's so good it's a professional threat to $category", "they've lobotomised it", "they don't have a moat", "they're too expensive"].
As the saying goes, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!"
Compute?
At least in the short term, it seems like the biggest wallets are going to win by default.
OpenAI has 700 people, Microsoft has 220,000 people.
OpenAI is strong but they're still dependent on MSFT.
Altman is out there trying to raise ridiculous sums to get away from Azure, didn't he make the first move here?
Basically something that is more than just another bump in the scorecard for GPT 5 over GPT 4. Otherwise it is still just a horse race between relatively interchangeable GPT engines.
Microsoft will want to avoid things regulators in the current regime will go after.
This seems like a step towards both and ultimately good for developers as it seems likely to bring costs down by increasing competition.