OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete? This is so, so, so much better than every other generative video AI we've seen. Most of those were basically a still image with a very slowly moving background. This is not that.
Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and when he does everybody else will be locked out forever.
I already know people who have basically opted out of life. They're addicted to porn, addicted to podcasts where it's just dudes chatting as if they're all hanging out together, and addicted to instagram influencers.
100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was playing with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown by "an astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back and look at the images they were creating then, and compare that to this.
> OpenAI demonstrating the size of their moat. How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete?
For posterity since the term has been misused lately, having a very good product isn't a moat in the business sense. There's nothing stopping a competitor from creating a similar product (even if it's difficult), and there's nothing currently stopping OpenAI's users from switching from using Sora to a sufficient competitor if it exists.
It definitely is. Having the best product and being able to maintain that best-in-class product status over time through a firm's 'internal capabilities' is very much a moat and a strong one at that. A moat is the business strategy sense is anything that enables a firm to maintain competitive advantage. Having the best product in a category, and being able to maintain that over releases is a strong competitive advantage (especially when there is high willingness to pay or price is a strong competitive dimension compared to the value created).
That's not a real moat except in one sense: if it is really expensive to get to the level to compete, and you know a competitive market would bring margins near zero, then no competitor may actually step up. We see this in off-patent drugs, where it may have 200X margins but no competitor will go through the FDA manufacturing reapproval process because they won't actually get those margins if they begin competing on price, and then the sunk cost of getting to the competitive level isn't worth anything for them.
I think OpenAI's big moats are in userbase feedback and just proprietary trade knowledge after they stopped sharing model details. They may have made some exclusive data source deals with book/textbook and other publishers, though it isn't clear a license is actually needed for that until things work through the courts.
The original "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" leaked memo from Google that memefied the term focuses explicitly on the increasing ease of competitors (especially open-source) entering the ecosystem: https://www.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat-and-ne...
Second: Massive capital expenditure, specifically in this case the huge cost of building or leasing enormous GPU clusters, is *exactly* what he means by this.
> What we're trying to find is a business that, for one reason or another -- it can be because it's the low-cost producer in some area, it can be because it has a natural franchise because of surface capabilities, it could be because of its position in the consumers' mind, it can be because of a technological advantage, or any kind of reason at all, that it has this moat around it.
He didn't seem to have specific definition at all really.
I think most people attribute it to a "secret sauce technology" in the case of OpenAI, I'm not sure if "finances to lease a huge cluster of GPUs" makes sense here because the main competitors (Google, AWS, Apple, etc) also have access to insane compute as well yet have struggled to get close to GPT4's performance in practice.
That said I do agree that it's a moat for the startups like stability/mistral, etc. They also have access to $/compute, albiet a lot less. And you can see this in their research, as they've been focused on methods to lower the training/inference costs.
I believe that Google actually has more AI compute at their disposal than OpenAI. They have been building out their TPU infrastructure for a while now. OpenAI is reliant on Azure obtaining nvidia GPUs.
So at least in the battle between OpenAI and Google, their moat right now are their models.
I disagree mainly because google, aws, apple, etc. All have similar, or even more access to GPU compute and funding for it, and in google's case also has been one of the main research contributers, yet they still struggle to touch GPT4's performance in practice.
If it was as simple as dropping 10's millions on compute they could do that, yet google's bard/gemini have been a year behind GPT4's performance.
That said I do agree that it's a moat for the startups like stability/mistral, etc. They also have access to $/compute, albiet a lot less. And you can see this in their research, as they've been focused on methods to lower the training/inference costs.
*I'm measuring performance by the chatbot arena's elo system and r/locallama
I agree it isn't a moat in the business sense - that would be some kind of lock in network effect.
e.g. If ChatGPT being popular gives OpenAI enough extra training data, they're locked in forever having the best model, and it is impossible for anyone - even with unlimited money, and the same technology - to beat them. Because they don't have that critical data.
Yes, Google had the best search product, and got a huge market share simply by being better. Their moat however is that their search rankings are based off the click data of which search results people use and cause them to stop their search because they've found a solution.
They also have a moat to do with advertising pricing, based on volume of advertising customers.
Bing spend a lot of capital, and had the tech ability, but those two moats blocked them gaining more than a tiny market share.
In this case, maybe OpenAI will have a video business moat, maybe they don't...
Google, Microsoft and Facebook have capital and compute. That is not an OpenAI moat.
Facebook has Moat because of their social network. It is very hard to switch to another network. Google with search has no moat because it is easy to switch to a new search engine. OpenAI has no moat because it is easy to switch to a new AI chat once a better product becomes available. AWS has moat because it is hard to switch cloud providers. Apple has moat because people want to buy apple products. etc.
A moat can be seen where even if you have a worse product than the competition, or users hate you, they still use your products because the cost to switch is immense.
Being (a) first and (b) good enough is a moat. Nothing stopped people from switching from google to bing all these years other than not having any reason to.
> There's nothing stopping a competitor from creating a similar product
This is like saying there’s nothing stopping a competitor from launching reusable rockets into space. Of course there isn’t, but it’s hard and won’t happen for the foreseeable future.
Similarly with a physical moat, it’s not impossible to cross, but it’s hard to do.
It’s not the same because there is basically no cost to trying an OpenAI competitor. Betting your payload on an up and coming rocket company is a major business risk.
The point is that "moat" gets conflated with just being ahead in the game. I don't find it a super interesting point of contention, but there is a distinction alright.
"How many multi-million-dollar funded startups did this just absolutely obsolete?"
The play with AI isn't to build the tools to help businesses make money, the play is to directly build the businesses that makes the money.
In practice this means, don't focus your business model on building the AI to make text to video happen. Your business model should be an AI studio, if the tech you need doesn't exist, build it.... but if you get beat by someone with more GPU's and more data, cool use the better models. Your business model should focus on using the capability not building it. It's proving quite hard to beat someone with more GPU's, more data, more brain power.
But then you're stuck playing in the model owner's playground and if you're too successful they can yank the rug from under you and steal your business any time they want.
Indeed, they're letting all of these businesses and professionals subscribe to the gold mining equipment - but retaining ownership of it, and they'll be able to undercut those services and cut people off as they please.
This is effectively what Amazon does. Provide the infrastructure to make money selling things, then let merchants de-risk their R&D into what sells best and would be most profitable, then sell their own version of it.
I predict, this "AI" content generation will eat itself at last. It will outcompete the low-effort "content" industry as is. Then inevitably completely devalue this sort of "product". Because it will never get to 100% of the real thing, the "AI" content craze will ultimately implode.
I bet we won't get AGI as a progression of this very technology. The impression of "usefulness" will end when "AI" is starting to drink its own Koolaid on a large scale (copilot lol), and when everyone starts using it as super inefficient business interface. Overfitted mediocre mediocrity, on steroids.
Hopefully, this sobriety happens before the economy collapses, as a consequence of all dem bullshit jobs cleansed.
I think this analysis is flawed. New technologies are usually bad at substituting for things that already exist. It's 100% true this will not substitute for the existing genre of film and video.
New technologies change the economics of how we satisfy our needs.
When search engines became good, many pundits confidently predicted Google would never replace librarians or libraries. It didn't. It shifted our relationship to knowledge; instead of having to employ an expert in looking things up, we all had to become experts at sifting through a flood of info.
When the cost of producing art-directed and realistic video goes to zero it's hard to predict what's going to happen. Obviously the era of video = veracity is now over. And you can get the equivalent of Martin Scorsese and a million dollar budget to do the video instructions for a hair dryer. Instead of hunting for a gif to express how you feel, captured from an existing TV show or something, you could create a scene on the fly and attach it to a text message. Or maybe you dispense with text messages altogether. Maybe text is only for talking to computers now.
My personal prediction is that the value of a degree in art history is going to go way, way up, because they'll be the best prompt engineers. And just like desktop publishing spawned legions of amateur typesetters, it will create lots of lore among amateur video creators.
I haven't seen a lot of use cases outside of productions and businesses, which shouldn't exist in the first place (at least to this extent).
Some of our "needs" are flawed, since "content" speaks to evolutionary relicts developed in times of scarcity and life in small groups. In the unbounded production of "AI", there is no way to keep up the sense of newness of input indefinitely. I am already fatigued by "AI" """art""". It has no real relevancy. You can't trust any of it.
Every medium where "AI" content becomes prevalent, will lose it's appeal. E.g. if I get the impression a significant proportion of comments here were "AI" generated, I will leave HN. Thing is, all these open platforms can't prevent "AI" spam. So they will die. Look at the frontpage of Reddit... it's almost all reposts, by karma farming bots. Youtube "AI" spam already drowning real content. This is what's going to happen to everything. User content will die. "Content" will die. The web will die. You won't even try, because of "AI" generated fatigue.
> My personal prediction is that the value of a degree in art history is going to go way, way up, because they'll be the best prompt engineers.
Lol. Yeah, "best prompt engineer" in the infinitely abundant production economy...
You people really need to iterate the world you are imagining a few times more and maybe think about some fundamentals a bit.
Do people care about 100% of the real thing though? Phone photos are oversaturated and over-sharpened. TikTok and other social media videos are more often then not run through filters giving their creators impossibly smooth skin and slim waists along with other effects not intended to look in any way realistic. Almost every major motion picture has tons of visual effects that defy physical reality. Nature documentaries have for decades faked or sweetened their sound production, staged their encounters with wildlife, etc.
People are more concerned about being stimulated than they are about verisimilitude.
AI is more akin to a zero sum game. It won't add 10% to the global economy (and if it did - it would be around "peak of inflated expectations" and, likely, have a corollary slide down into the "trough of disillusionment") because it will both distract budgets and/or redirect budgets. That hypothetical $7T is not coming out of thin air. I'd even go as far to argue that this hype cycle will ultimately detract from global economy over time as it's a significant draw on resources that could have been / would have been used on more productive efforts long term.
This reads like it could be used to reason against the industrial revolution or the first computer revolution or any other significant advance in human history. Am I missing something?
If he had, it would've been a bargain for the impact of the industrial revolution.
Watt couldn't have asked, his engines specifically weren't enough of a difference by themselves even though the revolution as a whole was, and I strongly suspect this is also going to be true for any single AI developer; however a $7T investment in many unrelated chip factories owned by different people and invested over a decade, is something I can believe happening.
The industrial revolution wasn't a leech on resources for little to no value. Most of the energy and diverged efforts by companies globally is currently being wasted on efforts to try and figure out how to profit from this "revolution". This isn't a revolution, this currently looks like a heist of epic proportions.
If the industrial revolution wasted the majority of its input for low value / unneeded output it wouldn't have been a revolution. Please enlighten me on how LLMs have revolutionized the world and then feel free to share how much energy, money and time have been sunk thus far with little to show as a tangible increase in the lives of a global human population.
It is a future projected value of a company. You can not realize it. If you start selling stocks, they will drop at a rapid pace. The entire stock market is in a way projection of all future money the stocks will potentially make for a long time. This is not liquid cash that can be injected for any other purpose.
OpenAI's moat is (a) talent (b) access to compute (c) no fear of using whatever data they can get.
On the other hand, I think these moats will be destroyed as soon as anyone finds a drastically more efficient (compute- and data-wise) way to train LLMs. Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the intelligence of a human.
(Of course it is possible that at that point, OpenAI may then be able to achieve something far superior to human intelligence, but there is a LOT of $$$ out there that only needs human levels of intelligence.)
> Biology would suggest that it doesn't take $100 million worth of GPUs and exaflops of compute to achieve the intelligence of a human.
Biology suggests that a self-replicating machine can exist by ingesting other machines, turning them into energy and then using that energy to power themselves. Biology suggests that these machines can be so small that we cannot even see them.
I believe that synthetic biology had succeeded already a few years ago in making artificial cells with a fully synthetic genome designed by us with what is sufficient for the cell to eat, grow and replicate, se we already can design and make such 'machines'.
So make a biological AI then. What the parent was saying is that 'biology can do it with organic materials, so we should be able to do it with electronics".
There's nothing obviously wrong with assuming that "biology can do it with organic materials, so we should be able to do it with electronics" - while it's theoretically possible that we'll eventually identify some fundamental obstacle preventing that, as far as we currently know, computation is universal and the only thing that depends on the substrate is efficiency.
Since we have a much, much better industrial process for manufacturing electronic components, why attempt to make a biological AI if there's no current reason to believe that it being biological is somehow necessary or even beneficial?
> 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
This is the stuff of Brave New World. It's happening to us in real time.
> Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and when he does everybody else will be locked out forever.
I would be extremely surprised if he could get past the market cap of all current corporations as an investment. That doesn't mean "no, never"[0], but I would be extremely surprised.
$7T in one go would be 6.7% of global GDP, and is approximately the combined GDP of Japan and Canada.
> These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was playing with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown by "an astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back and look at the images they were creating then, and compare that to this.
Indeed, though I will moderate that by analogy: it's been just over 30 years since DOOM was released, and that was followed by a large number of breathless announcements about how each game had "amazing photorealistic graphics that beat everything else" while forgetting that the same people had said the same things about all the other games released since DOOM.
Don't get me wrong: these clips are amazing. They may not be perfect, but it took me a few loops to notice the errors.
I'm sure there are people with better eyes for details than me, who will spot more errors, spot them sooner, and keep noticing them long after GenAI seems perfect to me.
But I also expect that, just as 3D games' journalism spent a long time convinced the products were perfect when they weren't, so too will GenAI journalism spend a long time convinced the products are perfect before they actually are.
[0] a sufficiently capable AI is an economic power in its own right. I previously guessed, and even with it's flaws would continue to guess, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement student, and when I was one of those I was earning £1k/month (about £1.7k/month when adjusted for inflation).
Yes, the 'special effects' effect will kick in. Within a year or so, you'll spot this easily, quite aside from the more obvious issues. (That Landrover captioned 'DANDOVER' - is this still using BPEs?!)
Aside from visual plausibility, there's also the issue of physics: one of the things you would like to use video models for is understanding real-world physics and cause-and-effect for planning or learning _in silico_. Something may look good but get key physics wrong and be useless for, say, robotics.
> 100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
I think immersive games will also be a big application. Games AI will also benefit from being more strategically intelligent and from being able to negotiate, in a human-like fashion, with human and other AI players. The latter will not only make games better, it will also improve the intelligence of AIs.
I don't buy that. People form fan communities around these podcasts where they talk with real people about how much they love listening to minor internet celebrities talk about nothing. Why would they do that if the podcasts served that purpose already?
I think rather than replace real human contact, the internet has created an increased demand for it. People need every moment of their lives to be filled with human speech or images.
If I were to take off my "reasonable point" hat and put on my "grandiose bullshit" hat I'd say that in the same way drugs can artificially stimulate various "feel good" parts of your brain, we have found a way to artificially stimulate the "social animal" instinct until we're numb.
I think the real risk of this kind of AI is not that people live in a world of fake videos of their favorite celebrities talking to them, but that entire fake social media ecosystems are created for each individual filled with the content they want to see and fake people commenting on it so they can argue with them about it.
Everybody needs to read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick.
I may be having a hypomanic episode, but I've been thinking about it more, and it seems like the entire Internet Age has been an attempt to more precisely synthesize the substance which sates human social needs artificially, and that when they perfect it, it's all over.
I've been thinking along those lines too, but more from the angle that our goal is to eliminate any need to rely on other humans for anything. We consider the need for interacting with other humans as a burden and an inconvenience, and we're going to get rid of it, at the cost of all the indirect benefits we got from being forced to do it.
That's what Twitch has become too. The most popular Twitch streamers do nothing other than watching YouTube videos and providing a fake relationship to their 50,000 live viewers.
It looks like some people are just learning that introverts exist. Maybe there's something interesting about how more common it is, but none of this is new.
I agree with much of what you say, but I'm not sure the dystopian conclusion is the main one I'd draw.
Improving your ability to connect with and enjoy/learn from people all around the world is one of the main value props of the internet, and tech like this just deepens that potential. Will some people take this to an unhealthy degree that pulls them too far out of reality? Yes. But others will use it to level up their abilities, enrich their lives, create beautiful things, and reduce loneliness.
seems like a significant chunk of the population may opt in to the Matrix voluntarily.
on another note I find it funny they released this right after Google announced their new model. Bad luck for Google or did OpenAI just decide to move up their announcement date to steal their thunder?
If there is a high fidelity nice simulation of a pleasant world, and the actual real world is a hellscape, what is the problem with that?
If you were presented with the fact that whatever your life is is just an illusion, and you are actually a starving slave in North Korea, you would choose to "wake up"?
Well, there are huge downsides to using cocaine, whether it is undesired health impacts, or addiction, or threat of arrest, or mere cost, or even just social stigma.
I'm not sure there are downsides to living out your life in a simulation while robots take care of your physical form.
actually the opposite imo, this stuff is the ultimate bread and circus to distract poor people from worsening living conditions. Much cheaper to provide VR goggles with AI model access than housing and healthcare
As long as sex is the competition, I don't think that's likely. Simulating orgasms will require the Apple iPleasure Maxxx implant and expensive brain surgery & recovery.
I think there are people for whom the fundamental assumption that someone will want "more" of stuff they already like does not hold, and that while those people are a minority, recent developments in the media landscape toward a constant stream of increasingly similarity-curated media has caused them to increasingly disengage from media consumption
That said, those people are by definition less relevant to internet consumption metrics
Even with 7 trillion, he is still going to need a national grid that can supply the power for the compute.
There is a lot that has to planned and put in place now to get there.
As for people that have opted out of life. We would have a better world if we started encouraging more dreamers/doers like out of the movie Tomorrowland.
>100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
All of these things are against the terms of service and attempting them may result in a ban.
Is there an open-source GPT4 equivalent right now? Doesn't seem like anything has taken off and gotten rave reviews on the level of OpenAI's offering yet.
I'm fairly sure $7T is a speculation bubble, and that's going to pop like all bubbles pop. It's the combined GDP of Japan and Canada. It's too big for an investment.
It's not necessarily too big for a valuation, as a sufficiently capable AI is an economic power in its own right: I previously guessed, and even despite its flaws would continue to guess within the domain of software development at least, that the initial ChatGPT model was about as economically valuable to each user as an industrial placement student, and when I was one of those I was earning about £1.7k/month when adjusted for inflation, US$2.1k at current nominal exchange rates. 100 million users at that rate is $2.52e+12/year in economic productivity, and that's with the current chip supply and (my estimate of) the productivity of a year-old model — and everyone knows that this sector is limited by the chips, and that $7T investment story is supposed to be about improving the supply of those chips.
Looks like they have made large progress in hand generation. They still look like claws a bit but you didn’t have to add a workaround for the query to render correctly and I had to zoom in to verify . When I was watching it the first time I didn’t even notice hand issues.
it wouldn't be too difficult to make a tiktok like app that created tailored prompts for sora based on the user and tracking data. Question is whether it is profitable
Hopefully, the line between the real world and virtual world gets stronger once again.
Sam is probably going to get his $7T if he keeps this up, and when he does everybody else will be locked out forever.
I already know people who have basically opted out of life. They're addicted to porn, addicted to podcasts where it's just dudes chatting as if they're all hanging out together, and addicted to instagram influencers.
100% they would pay a lot of money to be able to hang out with Joe Rogan, or some only fans person, and those pornstars or podcasts hosts will never disagree with them, never get mad at them, never get bored of them, never thing they're a loser, etc.
These videos are crazy. Highly suggest anybody who was playing with Dall-E a couple of years ago, and being mindblown by "an astronaut riding a horse in space" or whatever go back and look at the images they were creating then, and compare that to this.