IBL News | New York
LLMs (large language models), still in their infancy, are becoming “more of a commodity,” said Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella.
A common view in the industry is that it is hard to separate OpenAI’s latest GPT from Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini.
On the consumer side, Meta said last week that 500 million people are now looking at its Meta.AI at least once a month,
However, today, OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s dominance is undisputed. Its 250 million users a week and a $20 monthly subscription fee paid by a small minority result in annualized revenue of $3.6 billion.
Also, ChatGPT can point to a favored position on the iPhone, thanks to a deal with Apple.
On the downside, OpenAI, without a functional business model yet, is on track to burn through over 5 billion of cash this year,
Experts say that OpenAI’s biggest challenges are the lack of deep moats around its business and its intense competition, as the costs of querying for other LLMs have fallen rapidly.
In addition, the capabilities of open-source AI models have advanced quickly, making them viable alternatives and raising the possibility of the commodification of LLMs.
Meta’s Llama hasn’t yet become “the Linux of AI,” as Mark Zuckerberg suggested last week.
OpenAI’s latest voice-powered GPT-4o model has been credited with breaking new ground in naturalistic voice interaction, potentially opening up new consumer markets to AI.
Also, its GPT-o1 is the first model capable of breaking a complex problem.
For now, OpenAI, backed by investors at a $150 billion valuation, maintains an edge in model-building despite powerful companies in tech closing fast.
