Re:Google “We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI”
by dragonwriter on Thursday May 04, 2023 @01:27PM
(#35819065)
> Having enough scale to perpetually offer free/low-cost compute is a moat.
Its a moat for services, not models, and its only a moat for AI services as long as that compute isn’t hobbled by being used for models which are so inefficient compared to SOTA as to waste the advantage, which underlines why leaning into open source the way this piece urges is in Google’s interests, the same way open source has worked to Google and Amazon’s benefits as service providers in other domains.
(Not so much “the ability to offer free/low-cost compute” but “the advantages of scale and existing need for widely geographically dispersed compute on the cost of both marginal compute and having marginal compute close to the customer where that is relevant”, but those are pretty close to differenly-focussed rephrasings of the same underlying reality.)
Its a moat for services, not models, and its only a moat for AI services as long as that compute isn’t hobbled by being used for models which are so inefficient compared to SOTA as to waste the advantage, which underlines why leaning into open source the way this piece urges is in Google’s interests, the same way open source has worked to Google and Amazon’s benefits as service providers in other domains.
(Not so much “the ability to offer free/low-cost compute” but “the advantages of scale and existing need for widely geographically dispersed compute on the cost of both marginal compute and having marginal compute close to the customer where that is relevant”, but those are pretty close to differenly-focussed rephrasings of the same underlying reality.)