> Succeeding by building pure tech with no pre-established audience will be very hard
But that's how "Open"AI and Hugging Face started, didn't they? So, it's possible. Not easy, and probably not single-handedly. I would say it's much harder then selling another game in app store.
Hugging Face is a niche business at best, and OpenAI is pure hype, no real substance. I know you'll find someone saying (maybe even in this thread) "I use ChatGPT daily to make my job 10x easier" but these anecdotes are dubious at best.
Imo, the real winners here will be Nvidia and Apple, which provide software/hardware coupling for these AI features. And most of these are features, not products. Midjourney is a rare example of a real product, but the quality of generative art if you don't include copyrighted art in the training set is pretty bad, so there's a lot of complications there.
> "I use ChatGPT daily to make my job 10x easier" but these anecdotes are dubious at best.
It can do things that I have to google first, but would rather offload. Still don't use it regularly, may be it or something like it one day. We are just at the beginning, it's only a few months since we've got something coding.
> Imo, the real winners here will be Nvidia and Apple,
NVidia already is, just recently it's stock jumped +25%+. I expect it do go further up as there is no real strong competition. When robotics pics up NVidia will be a winner again. They invested a lot in hard- and soft-ware.
OoenAI may be hype but if they got 100M people paying $20 a month for the occasional use of their premium models I would call that a valid business. It does not matter that vicuna or whatever are nearly as good if people are paying for their model and ecosystem.
Yes, that is why I say 'if they had'. No way they have that many now but amoungst my associates many are still just starting to purchase the payed subscriptions.
One advantage that I hope a paid version of GPT4 has (like ChatGPT Premium) over a free one (like Bing), is that it is a matter of time before the Bing answers will be polluted by whatever an advertiser is willing to spend its money on. Whereas with ChatGPT I am the paying customer.
I say "I hope", because time and time again it was shown that companies happily take money from both sides and skew the product to the wishes of the one that pays most, i.e. not me.
And since the results of AI are way less transparent than the appearance of an ad, the user will be screwed. If anything, GTP is a master of undetected product placement.
So in the end it will all be in vain, but for now, the paid version looks better than the free.
Not for many specific topics. If Nike pays OpenAI millions of dollars to overweight their products in the model, do you think they are going to say no? Maybe for now during the hyper growth phase, but long term I expect there will be hundreds of companies with large ad budgets paying the leading AI companies to skew output or censor certain results in their favor.
Hugging Face is probably the AI company with the most widespread traction aside from OpenAI and Midjourney. The entire "open LLM" movement is based on Hugging Face.
If Google announced a ChatGPT equivalent embedded in Google Docs, I think ChatGPT would lose a ton of users very quickly. The Microsoft partnership/investment is their saving grace.
I think it’s a bit early to declare either of them to be a long-term (commercial) success.
> The Microsoft partnership/investment is their saving grace.
Who's saving who, though?
> Last December, Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft's sprawling research efforts, told Nadella Microsoft's researchers were blown away by the GPT-4's ability to understand conversational language and generate humanlike answers, and they believed it showed sparks of artificial general intelligence.
> Nadella demanding to know how OpenAI had managed to surpass the capabilities of the AI project Microsoft's 1,500-person research team had been working on for decades said, "OpenAI built this with 250 people. Why do we have Microsoft Research at all?"
But that's how "Open"AI and Hugging Face started, didn't they? So, it's possible. Not easy, and probably not single-handedly. I would say it's much harder then selling another game in app store.