Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond OpenAI

You're really generating $3000 per month from ChatGPT? Can you give a hint about what you've built that generates this kind of ROI?

I have only seen people making money in AI by selling AI products/promises to other people who are losing money. The practical uses of these tools still seem to be largely untapped outside of as enhanced search engines. They're great at that, but that does not have a return on value that is in proportion to current investment in this space.

I get that there are limitations with LLMs, but I don't understand people saying it has no value, just because it occasionally hallucinates. Over the past week I've used chatGpt to code not one, but two things that were completely beyond my knowledge (an auto delete js snippet, and a gnome extension that turns my dock red if my vpn turns off). These are just two examples. I've also used it to write a handy regex and write a better bash script.

LLMs are insanely helpful if you use them with their limitations in mind.

Last night I asked ChatGPT 4 to help me write a quick bash script to find and replace a set of 20 strings across some liquid files with a set of 20 other strings. The strings were hardcoded, it knew exactly what they were in no unclear terms. I just wanted it to whip up a script that would use ripgrep and sed to find and replace.

First, it gave me a bash script that looked pretty much exactly like what I wanted at first glance. I looked if over, verified it even used sed correctly for macOS like I told it, and then tried to run it. No dice:

    replace.sh: line 5: designer_option_calendar.start_month.label: syntax error: invalid arithmetic operator (error token is ".start_month.label")

It then spat out a “fixed” version of the script that was exactly the same, it just changed the name of the variable. Of course, that didn’t work so I switched tactics and asked it to write a python script to do what I wanted. The python script was more successful, but the first time it left off half of the strings I wanted it to replace, so I had to ask it to do it again and this time “please make sure you include all of the strings that we originally discussed.”

Another short AI example, this time featuring Mistral’s open source model on Ollama. I’d been interested in a script that uses AI to interpret natural language and turn it into timespans. Asking Mistral “if it’s currently 20:35, how much time remains until 08:00 tomorrow morning” had the model return its typical slew of nonsense and the answer of “13.xx hours”. This is obviously incorrect, though funnily enough when I plugged its answer into ChatGPT and asked it how it thought Mistral may have come to that answer, it understood that Mistral did not understand midnight on a 24 hour clock.

These are just some of my recent issues with AI in the past week. I don’t trust it for programming tasks especially — it gets F# (my main language) consistently wrong.

Don’t mistake me though, I do find it genuinely useful for plenty of tasks, but I don’t think the parent commenter is wrong calling it snake oil either. Big tech sells it as a miracle cure to everything, the magic robot that can solve all problems if you can just tell it what the problem is. In my experience, it has big pitfalls.

The bubble is that every $1 in capital going to OpenAI/Nvidia is a $1 that cannot be invested anywhere else: Healthcare, Automotive, Education, etc. Of course OAI and Nvidia will invest those funds, but in areas beneficial purely to them. Meta has lost $20bn trying to make Horizon Worlds a success, and appears to have abandoned it.

Even government-led industrialization efforts in socialist economies led to actual products, like the production of the Yagan automobile in Chile in the 1970s[0].

We've already had a decade plus of sovereign wealth funds sinking tens of billions into Uber and autonomous driving. We still don't have those types of cars on the road and it's questionable whether self driving will even generate the economic growth multiplier that its investment levels should merit.

[0] https://journal.hkw.de/en/erinnerungen-an-den-yagan-allendes...

I’m really curious what is making you so much more productive. My experience with AI has largely been the opposite. Also curious how you’re using AI to make $3,000 per month more than you would without it.

You may be getting 100x value out of your 30 bucks.

Is that the only variable that one needs to consider to gauge if this is bubble territory?

It's that "it's only going to get better" part that is driving the bubble, I think.

The market has this idea that over the next year, we're somehow going to have AI that's literally perfect. Yet that's not how technology works, it takes decades to get there.

It'd be like if the first LCD TV was invented, and all of a sudden everyone is expecting 8k OLED by the next year. It just doesn't work like that.

Can I paste links in replies here? I wrote an article about the AI bubble a few weeks ago.

Do any AI companies actually turn a profit? I feel like the only real winner is Nvidia because they are selling shovels to the gold diggers, while all the gold diggers are trying to outspend each other without a business model that has any consideration for unit economics.

There is very clear value in LLMs

The bubble is that it is not clear there is a $XXXB business in building or hosting them.

OpenAI is losing money hand over fist, open source models are becoming available that are on-par and so commoditize the market, etc.

largest/simplest productivity improvement in my life, so far

many productivity improvements in the last years: Internet Search, Internet Forums, Wikipedia, etc. LLMs and other AI models is continuation of the improvement of information processing.

ChatGPT plus is approx 300 USD yearly. You are earning 30k (100x) USD more yearly due to ChatGPT? Or earning 100k with 30% use or your time?

AI has massively increased my productivity. There are real users like me who will continue to pay up. This is not the same.

Yep, there are similarities between the blockchain rush and the AI rush.

But in my last piece on AI, I said that AI is 50X Blockchain!

Noone thought beating the game of Go was feasible.

Oh, yes, we did, once we beat chess. It was just a matter of time.

Noone thought self-driving cars would actually work.

And... they don't? Call me when I can buy a regular car where I can sleep while traveling 8 hours, driven by the car itself. We're probably "flying cars" away from that.

This doesn’t make any sense. If nobody thought the things were possible then why did they bother trying to do them?

And even spend as much time and resources as they did trying to do them?

Noone thought self-driving cars would actually work.

Many people thought self driving WOULD work and that we'd be further along than we are now. We have vastly overestimated how far we'd be, and vastly underestimated how much time and effort it would actually take.

Self driving cars as they exist today are still mere toys compared to where the industry thought they were going to be. Look at Cruise, Waymo, Zoox, Uber's ex-self driving car division and others.

We are not anywhere near the self-driving autonomous cars we had hoped for.

Isn't the role of a concept artist mainly to do worldbuilding and drawing second? AI does not seem to have a good world model, they make pretty pictures but they lack thought behind them.

It's a shame the phrase "black box" exists in machine learning when it could have been "black bubble".

The expectation is that there will be a large pot of revenue at the end of the road, but we haven’t seen the killer apps to substantiate this

Imho, unlike crypto and NFT, AI is not a solution in search of a problem. While there is a lot of hand waving, it is not very adventurous to predict that there will be significant productivity gains by adding AI on top of current business processes. Thus the killer apps will be... the same apps we are using today with a touch of AI magic dust.

that's the root of my skepticism. I've yet to see huge transformational projects involving AI from the grapevine of my 750k+ employee consulting firm, all I hear about are experiments, webinars, and POCs. What I see in the news regarding the few projects live is not good, AirCanada and some others where the AI went wrong and now the company has to backtrack.

There's no doubt the tech community is all excited because genai, indeed, helps write code but I've yet to hear a large company like Coca Cola announce large AI transformation projects the way they announced large cloud transformation projects a few years ago.

I get more and more on the AI bandwagon as time goes on but I still have a pretty healthy skepticism on how deep and wide the tech will penetrate day to day business at enterprises and that's where the ROI is.

Well, the major win will be when AI makes human labor uneconomical. Not sure what that's going to do to the stock prices though...

All in Podcast

Calacanis and Palihapitiya are the Jim Kramers of tech.

If I had to pick one player who wanted to win the AI race and was willing to be ruthless to do it, I'd pick Nvidia. Computation is the excludable bottleneck, and Nvidia is the essentially the singular company who makes AI computers.

Hire Ilya, get him to hire as many of the best folks he can.

Stop selling GPUs. Hoard them. Introduce some subtle bug into the drivers that dramatically increases their rate of burn out.

Figure out some reasonable way to give attribution to original content creators, approximately solve the content ID problem of the AI age. Cut the content creators into the rev share in proportion to their data importance to the model. Make the content creators incredibly pissed off that their work is being stolen by big AI companies unfairly and encourage to them to sue the other big AI firms. Their content share multiplier increases if they get injunctions against LLM firms.

Convince politicians that the AI firms have performed an intellectual heist of epic proportions, and that they must not be allowed to even generate synthetic training data from poisoned models. With the content creators united behind you, convince congress that poisoned models must be destroyed, that even using synthetic training data from poisoned models must be illegal. Make them start over from a clean room with no copyrighted data.

They also have brand recognition, for what it’s worth. Every non-engineer in the world practically thinks AI == ChatGPT.

There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance.

Hard disagree. OpenAI's function calling is something no other commercial model provides, not even Gemini and Mistral Large.

There doesn't seem to be moats right now in this industry except for pure model performance.

Compute?

At least in the short term, it seems like the biggest wallets are going to win by default.

Eh, all this talk of "moats" etc. feels weird when just a few years ago it seemed like everyone was complaining they'd rearranged their corporate structure to include a fully-owned profit-making subsidiary to attract investments, and all the loud voices seemed to think a cap of x100 return on investment was so large it was unlikely to be reached.

And then OpenAI tripped and fell over a magic money printing factory, and the complaints are now in the set ["it's just a stochastic parrot", "it's so good it's a professional threat to $category", "they've lobotomised it", "they don't have a moat", "they're too expensive"].

As the saying goes, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!"

MSFT needs companies like OpenAI to give Azure credits to for their valuation to continue soaring. The deferred revenue on their balance sheet from the unspent Azure credits they give as investment are worth much more to their market cap than $80B.

I think the main move would be some type of true AGI that leads to a hard takeoff scenario, but it isn't clear we are close to that or not.

Basically something that is more than just another bump in the scorecard for GPT 5 over GPT 4. Otherwise it is still just a horse race between relatively interchangeable GPT engines.

You are a little confused. There’s no “compiling” of LLMs. It’s just once it’s trained, inference takes less compute than further training. So you can run things locally that you couldn’t necessarily train locally.

Not sure where you are getting the CSAM bit. We aren’t that good at blanking out weights in any kind of model, certainly not good enough to lobotomize specific types of content.

You’re downvoted for the snarky tone I guess, but you’re absolutely right

The whole embrace, extend.. ?

Mistral Remove "Committing to open models" from their website

That was 5 hours ago.

Without having insider details it is hard to know why, but the coincidence of timing with the Microsoft deal is not lost on me. It could have even been a stipulation.

what’s the most promising?

"Microsoft recommends OpenAI as your default overlord. Did you know it can do everything your current AI can do, sometimes better, but always more profitably for us? [Switch now] [Ask me again in 30 seconds]"

And they are used to that issue too. A long history of it.

This is how microsoft has been doing data for at least 10 years (See databricks).

Step 1: Get the industry leaders to be purchasable via Azure. Step 2: Slowly build your own clone and start stealing user share even though your offering is still worse.

Nadella [in December 2022] abruptly cut off Lee midsentence, 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. “OpenAI built this with 250 people,” Nadella said, according to Lee, who is executive vice president and head of Microsoft Research. “Why do we have Microsoft Research at all?”

The answer to that is till Google released the Attention is All You Need paper in 2017 there were no breakthroughs allowing models as we have now to be built, OpenAI being a small and nible team picked up on which direction the wind is blowing with LLMs and quickly brought a product to market whilst MS just did what corps do - move slowly (same for Google etc).

Please, god, no. I can’t think of two more antithetical companies.

Uh, sorry, but this seems pretty consistent with trying to co-opt and kill open source AI competition:

[EEE] describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

We should just automete these comments: MS: Oh No! Embrace Extend Extinguish ! Google: Oh No! killedbygoogle ! Meta: Oh No! So much Ads ! Apple: Oh No! Evil App Store policy !

given that we're even asking that question implies that we are closer to AGI than caveman

"Am I close to having gills and breathing underwater?" The fact that I asked, changes nothing.

The Google Workspace is roughly comparable with Office 365. But Microsoft has a lot more than just Office.

Those are all web toys. We’re talking about databases and CRMs and programming languages and all the stuff that make the backbone of big corporations.

Correct, but there’s typically a divide between workspace tools and infrastructure for ownership, compliance, and approval internally.

In a prior life, our IT manager was the owner of Microsoft productivity products and I was the owner of Azure. We both had drastically different risk profiles and governance needs.

And how will that materialize? Will Apple build a new AI chip that would be affordable enough to embed in every iPhone, or whatever new device they will invent? Or will it all be cloud based where it should be able to support hundreds of millions of users?

Microsoft already has the cloud infrastructure ready. They don't need to build a new device, or a new operating system, or whatever. They're milking the AI cow as we speak.

I won’t say Microsoft’s hardware is or ever was as good as Apple’s, I think they are far better at UI/UX and hardware than Google.

Microsoft-proper hardware is crap, even compared to high-end Google. However, that doesn't matter. My Thinkpad eats Apple hardware for breakfast (as well as anything from Google or Microsoft). Dell has a few nicer laptops in the Precision line which do almost as well as Thinkpad, and definitely better than Apple / Google / Microsoft.

It's the ecosystem.

Actually I think they’re better at almost everything than Google.

I'd agree, except:

- Hardware

- Office 365 typing synchronization

Google Pixel Pro is quite good (as are most top-of-the-line Google phones), as was the Chromebook Pixel (their top-of-the-line Chromebook, when they made it).

Actually hilarious that you think ads are going away. Microsoft has already started pitching ways to embed advertising and sponsored links in AI responses [1]. They've already built prototypes [2]. It will probably be worse than in search because AI ads will blend more seamlessly into a written or spoken paragraph.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsofts-bing-plans-ai-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35359338

Mistral Large is quite close to GPT 4 per the stats from today:

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-large/

Now once OpenAI launches GPT 5 well I am sure other models won't look so good, but right now these other models are approaching GPT 4 capabilities.

For now. As others have said, there is no technological “moat” in this business that could prevent others from catching up.

Perhaps the best way for Open AI is to become THE established AI services company. AWS is still the leader in cloud computing space, and only has Azure competing, despite the fact that other big companies are also technologically capable of building similar products.

I find gemini advanced better than gpt4. it is my go to option now.

Is that true? I was running Llamas on my laptop a few days ago, and it was giving measurably worse results than ChatGPT. I think it was the uncensored 13B model, but if you got something that's on par with ChatGPT that I can run on my own hardware I'm pretty interested.

Open source alternative are already on par with GPT-3.5 and 4 capabilities

I'm not sure if this is true. With GPT-4, I can successfully ask questions in Japanese and receive responses in (mostly natural) Japanese. I have also found GPT-4 capable of understanding the semantics of prompts with Japanese and English phrases interleaved.

Out of curiosity, I tried doing the same with local models like Mistral 7B and I could never get the model to emit anything other than English. Maybe it's a difference in training data, but even then, GPT-4 has an allegedly small set of training data for non-European languages.

What open source alternative is on par with GPT4?

Mistral's API was designed to be practically interchangeable with the OpenAI API.

Is gpt4 as good in non-English uses? It's not clear to me that it would be particularly important or advantageous, but does Mistral being based in Europe and polyglot first make it interesting vs. gpt4 in some dimension?

I don't disagree with you, but an open source model fine tuned for your use case, and embedded with your data is probably going to be way better at many companies uses cases than GPT4 is.

Gemini seems much better than GPT-4 in image understanding.

Here's a test I did trying to read Persian from an image:

https://chat.openai.com/c/bc45cc9c-fd19-4359-9096-3936d4d17a...

https://gemini.google.com/app/3286bdfb5f24cd36

I can read Persian and can confirm Gemini (not even the Advanced model) got it right while GPT-4 blew it.

Complaining about Google's AI has become some kind of right-wing culture war thing.

I've found it much better for anything that needs book knowledge.

Since I am on the free tier of both I guess I have only used GPT 3.5 and whatever the free offering of Gemini is.

I find Gemini to be significantly slower. I am sure Google can fix that on premium tiers.

I also found Gemini to be less able. It has fewer tasks / fields it will answer about. Gemini is more honest though.

ChatGPT seems to nearly in all cases say "Sure I can do that" and then return some non-coherent answer.

It is organizational. The amount of time people spend on performance reviews and other organizational dances can easily be harvested for more productive activities.

But no. Thousands of employees gotta do the dance for blind committees.

You are to forgiving

I think the point is that companies aren't good or evil, they are amoral non-aligned super intelligences that maximise shareholder profits.

So wait, you're trying to interpret me saying "Microsoft tries to close up or eliminate anything it takes an interest in" to mean "Microsoft never loses"? Very different things.

You can't trust Microsoft to act in the interest of open-source projects, transparency in general, or the users of any of the things it buys. Not all of their attempts to harm ecosystems or products work, and this has very little to do with whether they win competitions with other tech giants. In fact, sometimes user distrust stemming from their long history of Embrace Extend Extinguish and other user-hostilities has played into their failures. But like most shambling behemoths of companies, their deep pockets allow them to stay the course through many failures

I suspect we are going to soon see political backlash against regulation in the EU as it is becoming very clear that this is causal to their bad capital markets.

Who would have thought that human rights are bad for business..

OAI merger?

And how exactly this earns money for them? embrace extend extinguish

Vscode is a bad example, almost all useful Plugins are closed source on purpose, the package they ship also includes modifications that aren't open either.

Don't get used to it being around. Google is probably killing them off soon:

@searchliaison

is the cache link in the search results gone forever?

Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.

Personally, I hope that maybe we'll add links to @internetarchive from where we had the cache link before, within About This Result. It's such an amazing resource. For the information literacy goal of About The Result, I think it would also be a nice fit -- allowing people to easily see how a page changed over time. No promises. We have to talk to them, see how it all might go -- involves people well beyond me. But I think it would be nice all around.

As a reminder, anyone with a Search Console account can use URL Inspector to see what our crawler saw looking at their own page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289

You're going to see cache: go away in the near future, too. But wait, I hear you ask, what about noarchive? We'll still respect that; no need to mess with it. Plus, others beyond us use it.

From: https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1753156161509916873

It is not.

I'm not so sure. Do you have a source?

You got a source for that?

Yeah computation has more layers and sellers, it's not a perfect analogy but good enough I feel