I personally didn't realize how fast other models would catch up to OpenAI.
There is a whole set of models now (and some like Meta are purposely trying to undermine OpenAI competitive advantage via open source models) and they are relatively interchangeable with nearly no lock-in.
OpenAI's main advantage is being first to market and having the strongest model (GPT 4), and maybe they can continue to run ahead faster than everyone else, but pure technical leadership is hard to maintain, especially with so many competitors entering.
Their main advantage for now is their super clean API. Open source alternative are already on par with GPT-3.5 and 4 capabilities, they just don't have as good a package but that could change rather quickly too.
> Open source alternative are already on par with GPT-3.5 and 4 capabilities
I'm not sure if this is true. With GPT-4, I can successfully ask questions in Japanese and receive responses in (mostly natural) Japanese. I have also found GPT-4 capable of understanding the semantics of prompts with Japanese and English phrases interleaved.
Out of curiosity, I tried doing the same with local models like Mistral 7B and I could never get the model to emit anything other than English. Maybe it's a difference in training data, but even then, GPT-4 has an allegedly small set of training data for non-European languages.
Is that true? I was running Llamas on my laptop a few days ago, and it was giving measurably worse results than ChatGPT. I think it was the uncensored 13B model, but if you got something that's on par with ChatGPT that I can run on my own hardware I'm pretty interested.
13B models probably cannot directly compare with ChatGPT 4 which maybe +1T parameters or a 5 way MoE of 200B each - or something like that. So you can not likely run a model competitive with ChatGPT locally in the near term.
For now. As others have said, there is no technological “moat” in this business that could prevent others from catching up.
Perhaps the best way for Open AI is to become THE established AI services company. AWS is still the leader in cloud computing space, and only has Azure competing, despite the fact that other big companies are also technologically capable of building similar products.
> AWS is still the leader in cloud computing space, and only has Azure competing, despite the fact that other big companies are also technologically capable of building similar products.
What happened to GCP? I personally switched away because of the bad experiences.. but is that happening in scale as well. I see it barely mentioned these days.
I'm pretty bearish on GPT 5 being better than 4. With how neutered 4 has gotten over time, I'd be surprised if GPT 5 is able to perform better with all the same restrictions that GPT 4 has. GPT 4 is less and less willing to actually accomplish a task for you than it is to tell you how you can do it. It looks more and more like Markov chains every day.
Sure, but it is somewhat disheartening to see GPT 4 still being the king by a clear margin after a full year, especially since it's been nerfed continuously for speed and cost effectiveness.
There is a whole set of models now (and some like Meta are purposely trying to undermine OpenAI competitive advantage via open source models) and they are relatively interchangeable with nearly no lock-in.
OpenAI's main advantage is being first to market and having the strongest model (GPT 4), and maybe they can continue to run ahead faster than everyone else, but pure technical leadership is hard to maintain, especially with so many competitors entering.