Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all time?

Re:Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all ... by smoldesu on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @01:37PM (#35171904)

I doubt it, recreating what they've done in a short span of time only requires a small amount of capital. All the big players probably have teams working on this internally, and there are probably dozens of stealth startups gathering money to compete.

I just don't see OpenAI scaling to the moon when the moat around their product is so shallow and disruptable. What is their long-term play besides having an API that can be replaced with by changing a POST request URL?

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Re:Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all ... by briHass on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @04:23PM (#35174221)

How do you define 'small amount of capital'? Assuming you have to buy the processing from one of the big 3 (likely not possible to own the hardware outright), you're looking at 10s of millions of dollars per training run.

It's certainly not outside reality for the well-known software companies to have divisions working on it, but I don't think we're quite at the point where garage startups can afford the compute.

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Re:Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all ... by smoldesu on Wednesday March 15, 2023 @05:04PM (#35174697)

> likely not possible to own the hardware outright

Why not? The majority of these models are running on fairly ubiquitous datacenter GPUs. They're being trained on highly available hardware. You're right that there's a compute barrier, but you get around that by throwing money at the problem. If someone was sufficiently motivated, they could probably dethrone OpenAI in 2 months with enough funding.

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Re:Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all ... by jonnyreiss on Thursday March 16, 2023 @12:26PM (#35184200)

> If someone was sufficiently motivated, they could probably dethrone OpenAI in 2 months with enough funding.

I'd argue Google is sufficiently motivated to dethrone OpenAI --- so why haven't they? They have plenty of money to throw at the problem as well.

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Re:Ask HN: Is OpenAI going to be the biggest company of all ... by yijuwarp on Monday March 20, 2023 @06:19AM (#35229509)

they've put themselves in a extremely interesting position, the only way they stay on top is through innovation. there definitely is a spot for a gigantic AI company.

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