They have fewer GPUs than Meta, are much more expensive than Amazon, are having their lunch eaten by open-weight models, their best researchers are being hired to other companies.
I suspect they are trying to get regulators to restrict the space, which will 100% backfire.
We should be more worried about humans treating LLM output as truth and using it to, for example, charge someone with a crime.
Humans have a shortish and leaky context window too.
As a mental exercise, try to quantify the amount of context that was necessary for Bernie Madoff to pull off his scam. Every meeting with investors, regulators. All the non-language cues like facial expressions and tone of voice. Every document and email. I'll bet it took a huge amount of mental effort to be Bernie Madoff, and he had to keep it going for years.
All that for a few paltry billion dollars, and it still came crashing down eventually. Converting all of humanity to paperclips is going to require masterful planning and execution.
128k is table stakes now, regardless. Google's models support 1 million tokens and 10 million for approved clients. That is 13x War and Peace, or 1x the entire source code for 3D modeling application Blender.
LLMs just aren't smart enough to take over the world. They suck at backtracking, they're pretty bad at world models, they struggle to learn new information, etc. o1, QwQ, and CoT models marginally improve this but if you play with them they still kinda suck
I agree about the OpenAI moat. They did just get 5 Googlers to switch teams. Hard to know how key those employees were to Google or will be to OpenAI.