In the long-term, I doubt that OpenAI will have a monopoly on LLMs. We're still very early in the development, and I don't see why other organisations, won't be able to catch up. The instruction-tuned LLaMa versions already look very promising, even with rather small & low-quality data sets. Compared to other technologies, the investment-requirements for LLMs still seem to be relativly low and something a number of companies or governments are able to finance.
I truly hope you're right. But there are a lot of factors at play apart from compute power. So many factors from UI/UX, censorship, pricing, to responsiveness need to be just right for product success. We are in a technology preview stage so the economics don't need to make sense for OpenAI (atleast for now), but they need to for the other companies since they're beholden to shareholders.
Bing chat is dumber than a bag of rocks although it supposedly uses GPT-4 when asked the same questions which is I believe a direct consequence of the requirement it be open to the the general public.
Add to the fact that GPT-4 handles technical questions well which is what makes it useful for me, but I'm worried future LLMs will be more tuned to handle non-technical questions with vague responses as way of focusing on the average layman user.
It's not the fault of OpenAI that Google/Meta hid their shiny AI product so long in the basement and i trust Sam in this matter much more than Sundar or Mark to not abuse the power.
Why? Sam is a cryptocurrency scammer with a more invasive system than most[1]. Maybe he just doesn’t have as much power to abuse, but I see no reason to think he won’t do it when given the chance.
Instead of thinking “what tech billionaire do I trust the most”, let’s take a step back and realise they all have too much control over the lives of others.
I think that's a reasonable grounds to make the claim it's not a worrying monopoly.
Also, OpenAI doesn't appear to have any capacity to stop other people doing LLMs.
And it's only been a few months since people went from normal people totally ignoring GPT-3 to treating ChatGPT as a magic oracle, so other companies being surprised and running to catch up isn't (or shouldn't be) a surprise.
And then there's the fact that nerds like *gestures at this site* us all, have already been getting leaked language models running on phones.
When first computers came up, only the government and big business had monopoly on them. It took 50 years until people were able to have their own independent (networked) computer in their homes.
Yet, the world didn't fall apart. (Actually, it almost did due to nuclear ICBMs, which were enabled by computers.) So I think we're gonna be fine.
I don't think that's a cogent argument. The quote "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is as close as I can get to without writing a long response. That kept them in business to the detriment of the industry even if the world didn't fall apart.
First mover advantage is real, even in consumer market; Zune was better but iPod won. Think of how different the world is today because of that.
I work on IBM mainframes, and as you can see, they didn't win, although they easily could have. But the success of System/360, as well IBM PC, owes to their openness, contrary to your claim.
It's not all or nothing forever. It look a long time before IBM came down. I would call domination for as long as they did a win.
Openness of the platform has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, it is their prevalence as a company on many areas even when there were perfectly good alternatives.
Or are you talking about MSFT providing the compute power and not actually OpenAI? If so I don't think that makes a difference.