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Is it so over for OpenAI? I just signed up for a Grok subscription for $7/month. Apparently the reasoning performance of their new model is on the same tier as ChatGPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. Image generation is best-in-class (using Flux). And of course it's much less neutered than the competition.
The miracles that OpenAI accomplished in the last 3 years now seem rather... commonplace. There's a lot of competitors at nearly the same level. Facebook's open-sourced AI, Llama 3.1, will commoditize the space. While it's not really feasible to run these models on your home computer (yet) it will be easy for smaller companies to buy compute and then sell Chat-GPT similar services. It will be a race to the bottom now.
OpenAI is running at a gigantic loss. I'm sure they were planning to capture a monopoly and then raise prices. That seems less likely to work now as their product is undifferentiated.
And the irony of Elon controlling a Chat-GPT similar is just too delicious. OpenAI management stole the IP of the non-profit for their own financial gain. Now open source is routing around the damage and rebuilding it all from scratch. I bet Grok's total development costs are like 1% of OpenAI's.
A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.
At minimum they have the ability to produce lots of synthetic data to train future models with, now they have this newer and cheaper model. And they have far more compute than before.
Same with Anthropic. Where is Opus 3.5? Hidden from us mere mortals.
Wasn't this explicit when OpenAI announced Sora but gave no public access?
They surely have some impressive stuff that isn't even revealed yet.
To a large extent I would expect them to keep ChatGPT as the flagship product and any upgrades would just be added on as features rather than "separate" models.
I am wondering if they've lost first-mover advantage, since any other companies that were sniffing around the same research-space surely know where to direct efforts now, even if they haven't stolen IP directly.
My bet is on OpenAI having a couple sizeable rabbits to pull out of their hat, but they could be true witchcraft or mere illusions.
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