Why don't Google/Amazon/Meta/Apple even try to compete with OpenAI?

> right now OpenAI has some kind of a monopoly in commercial large language models

No? That's absolutely false. You can, using commodity hardware, host your own GPT-based text transformer. There is no "monopoly" just because OpenAI provides an API and hosts the stuff themselves. They have a "monopoly" on the research used to create the later versions of GPT, but that's no more of a "monopoly" than Apple's monopoly on the iOS source code.

Comparable products can be made and released right now. I presume Google and Microsoft are working on integrating AI into their software, but what's the rush? Nobody wants to integrate faulty AI in their software, especially if it's as consistently wrong as ChatGPT is. Tuning this stuff will take time, and making people trust AI will take something much more impressive than ChatGPT. And considering how expensive these larger AI models are to train, it's completely understandable why nobody wants to pour $12 million dollars into building an Infinite Liability Machine.

Pretty much all of these companies have a similar LLM for internal use, but they've so far decided that releasing it externally doesn't make sense. OpenAI's main difference is making the model available for public demo, which they're willing to do because they're but willing to suffer reputational damage from the model saying something stupid, and they're more optimistic that public access will help them figure out how to make money off the model.

To understand the bigger companies, you have to ask "why go public?" Bigger companies just don't see a general purpose LLM as a product. You could argue that that's a big failure of imagination, but they're not lagging behind on the tech itself.

Google expected to release feb 8

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/02/it-sounds-like-googl...

Most likely they already do have comparable, or better models, we know for a fact google does. It's just not commercially advantageous to give anyone else access to it.

As another commentator mentioned, Google are announcing something next week.

Google have shown off a lot of stuff in papers and announcements without making it available to the public, I suspect they are sitting on a lot of stuff waiting to see how the market develops before they make there play.

Particularly when it comes to ChatGPT as this would dramatically alter there business if they were to introduce it into Google search, it's about to become interesting.

Are the FAANG type companies already so big and large that they don’t worry much about competition? They all dominate a certain vertical and just need to blow wind in a direction and they could dominate another market. How competitive do these companies even need to be anymore, rather than just sit like a bloated whale and keep the system running along without much change.

Presumably the business case for doing anything more compute expensive, just isn’t there right now.

Alexa, cortana, Siri, Google assistant, are all pretty awful and fall back to simply doing a Google search for anything even mildly complicated and just do “here’s what we found on the web for x” without any synthesis or context.

It's cheaper to let OpenAI figure all the stuff out first - then pour your war chest of money to n+1 their model instead of doing all the work of experimenting/failing/correcting course yourself.

Give it a year and they'll all have competing and better models.

"The answer to any question starting, 'Why don't they—' is almost always, 'Money.'" --Robert A. Heinlein

1) How do those companies profit off of creating and commercializing such a model? It's not even clear that Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI will turn a profit for them.

2) What are the odds of success of them creating a commercializable model that beats the competition enough to turn a profit? Probably not that high for anyone other than Google since a large body of heavily curated training data is needed.

While ChatGPT is a nice toy, it has not solved any real world problems yet. I guess the most lucrative apps will be in legal / medical.