Are people durably achieving a competitive advantage through the GPT?
I think we've seen some people striving for a competitive advantage, and willing to see one exist, but I don't know if we've seen any "AI company" turn a meaningful and durable profit yet (open to being wrong on this).
To me (so far), it seems like GPT use cases that apply it as a table stakes feature of some greater application (rather than an ecosystem or a platform), are the ones that are actually showing promise in terms of expected utility + value capture.
If GPT4+ level engines become as cheap to execute as a SQLite query, I think that's where things get interesting (you can start executing this stuff at the edge).
But I still can't see new companies (a la OpenAI, MidJourney, etc.) making a lot of money in this scenario, it seems to overwhelmingly favor companies that already have distribution.
We're likely way too early to call this one. Based on current hardware trends, GPT-4 will run on your phone within 6-10 years. Right now, folks are feeling out the edges of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense at extreme R&D and opex expense. In 10 years, we'd expect the winners of today to still be winners and have great margins due to declining compute costs.
Granted, if you are spending 10x the future value of the product your are offering ... then even a 10x decline in compute costs won't get you where you need to be.
CPU/GPUs are general purpose, if enough workload demand exists specialized Transformer cores will be designed. Likewise, its not at all clear that current O(N^2) self-attention is the ideal setup for larger context lengths. All to say, I'd believe we have another 8-10x algorithmic improvement in inference costs over the next 10 years. In addition to whatever Moore's law brings.
For programming it’s like an additional feature on top of Google. You can dump entire error logs, get correct syntax (i give it a 4/10 for accuracy though), and even dump your entire page of code if there’s a bug in it.
Yea the sql queries, string or array manipulation are better and fast than google 8/10 times because of the errors it generates.
In my opinion, Microsoft's proposed 365 Co-pilot pricetag of $30 per month per user will probably make a profit. High usage users being offset by low usage users when corporate 365 group memberships come into the mix. Many corporates will take a chance on it, willing to throw plenty of money at anything that is perceived as having a chance of improving hard to define competitive edge, creativity and productivity.
I think we've seen some people striving for a competitive advantage, and willing to see one exist, but I don't know if we've seen any "AI company" turn a meaningful and durable profit yet (open to being wrong on this).
To me (so far), it seems like GPT use cases that apply it as a table stakes feature of some greater application (rather than an ecosystem or a platform), are the ones that are actually showing promise in terms of expected utility + value capture.
If GPT4+ level engines become as cheap to execute as a SQLite query, I think that's where things get interesting (you can start executing this stuff at the edge).
But I still can't see new companies (a la OpenAI, MidJourney, etc.) making a lot of money in this scenario, it seems to overwhelmingly favor companies that already have distribution.