I do think much of the kind of software we were building before is essentially solved now, and in its place is a new paradigm that is here to stay. OpenAI is certainly the first mover in this paradigm, but what is helping me feel less dread and more... excitement? opportunity? is that I don't think they have such an insurmountable monopoly on the whole thing forever. Sounds obvious once you say it. Here's why I think this:
- I expect a lot of competition on raw LLM capabilities. Big tech companies will compete from the top. Stability/Alpaca style approaches will compete from the bottom. Because of this, I don't think OpenAI will be able to capture all value from the paradigm or even raise prices that much in the long run just because they have the best models right now.
- OpenAI made the IMO extraordinary and under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn't a walled garden that only the first mover controls.
- Chat is not the only possible interface for this technology. There is a large design space, and room for many more than one approach.
Taking all of this together, I think it's possible to develop alternatives to ChatGPT as interfaces in this new era of natural language computing, alternatives that are not just "ChatGPT but with fewer bugs". Doing this well is going to be the design problem of the decade. I have some ideas bouncing around my head in this direction.
Would love to talk to like minded people. I created a Discord server to talk about this ("Post-GPT Computing"): https://discord.gg/QUM64Gey8h
My email is also in my profile if you want to reach out there.
