depends on how much developers are willing to embrace the risk of building everything on OpenAI and getting locked onto their platform.
What's stopping OpenAI from cranking up the inference pricing once they choke out the competition? That combined with the expanded context length makes it seem like they are trying to lead developers towards just throwing everything into context without much thought, which could be painful down the road
> depends on how much developers are willing to […] getting locked onto their platform.
I mean.. the lock in risks have been known with every new technology since forever now, and not just the risk but the actual costs are very real. People still buy HP printers with InkDRM and companies willingly write petabytes of data into AWS that they can’t even afford to egress at current prices.
To be clear, I despise this business practice more than most, but those of us who care are screaming into the void. People are surprisingly eager to walk into a leaking boat, as long as thousands of others are as well.
Combination of 1) short-term business thinking (save $1 today = $1 more of EPS) and 2) fear of competition building AI products and taking share. thus rush to use first usable platform (e.g. openAI).
Psychology and FOMO plays interesting role in walking directly into a snake pit.
100%.I was even gonna add to my comment that these psychological biases seem to particularly affect business people, but omitted to stay on point. I don’t think like that, but I also can’t say what works better on average, so I’ll try to stay humble.
Also, with AI there’s not really a “roll your own” option as with Cloud – the barrier of entry is gigantic, which obviously the VCs love, because as we all know they don’t like having to compete on price & quality on an open market.
I suspect it is in OpenAI's interest to have their API as a loss leader for the foreseeable future, and keep margins slim once they've cornered the market. The playbook here isn't to lock in developers and jack up the API price, it's the marketplace play: attract developers, identify the highest-margin highest-volume vertical segments built atop the platform, then gobble them up with new software.
They can then either act as a distributor and take a marketplace fee or go full Amazon and start competing in their own marketplace.
Reminds me of that sales entrapment approach from cloud providers. “Here is your free $400, go do your thing” next thing you know you have build so much on there already that it is not worth the time and effort to try and allocate it regardless of the 2k bill increase -haha. Good times.
i mean sure it's lock in, but it's lock in via technical superiority/providing features. Either someone else replicates a model of this level of capability or anyone who needs it doesn't really have a choice. I don't mind as much when it's because of technical innovation/feature set (as opposed to through your usual gamut of non-productive anti-competitive actions). If I want to use that much context, that's not openAIs fault that other folks aren't matching it - they didn't even invent transformers and it's not like their competitors are short on cash.
What's stopping OpenAI from cranking up the inference pricing once they choke out the competition? That combined with the expanded context length makes it seem like they are trying to lead developers towards just throwing everything into context without much thought, which could be painful down the road