It's incredible how Google started ahead and then shot themselves repeatedly in the face by granting so much internal power to dubious AI "ethicists". Whilst those guys were publicly Twitter-slapping each other, OpenAI were putting in place the foundations for this.

The issue wasn't/isn't AI ethicists. It's their incentive model. They simply have trouble understanding how this helps their business. Same reason why Blockbuster found themselves behind Netflix, despite having clear visibility to watch Netflix slowly walk up and eat their lunch right in front of them.

Well, I'm curious, what is the business model of it? Just charge per 1k tokens or subscription? How do the plugins make money off this?

Two key ways

1. You use their services which makes them money (e.g. you're returned good flight info and book through chatgpt, they get commission)

2. You sell access to end users. The requests can be authenticated so you can give your paying users access to your stuff through an advanced natural language engine for the implementation cost of roughly adding a file explaining your APIs.

plugins dont need to make money, you are still using tokens and paying for those. the more plugins you use, the more conversation you also need and tokens

Yes, I think OpenAI has a business model here (token/subscriptions) but how do the external services make money? Will many of these apps be cannibalized by ChatGPT and other LLMs? For example, the Speak plugin for language teaching, at what point is ChatGPT good enough to do everything that Speak does?

If your business is mostly reliant on their API then they will eat you. You need to differentiate by having access to something they do not.

that...without eroding their cash cow search business.

Google is the Xerox GUI of our day. They invented this tech and did nothing with it while an upstart and Microsoft, ironically enough, took it and ran. They don’t even have a great data moat. They are in serious trouble.

Are you saying that Google doesn’t have a great data moat? That seems completely off considering Google search, YouTube, GCP, Google for Education/Work, Android, etc.

And yet, Bard seems to be worse than ChatGPT. Google aren't the only ones who can crawl the web. Given the depth of their index and how much spam it contains it might not even be the asset it seems.

In particular because they are more or less using a term index I believe. This new world relies on vector indexes for semantic search.

I'm not sure the quantity of data will be a differing factor once the LLM reaches a certain point of parameters.

In this context I think we’re talking about moat, i.e., private data, that they can leverage for personalized experiences. Similar to what Microsoft announced with their Office365 Copilot stuff.

nah if anything the AI ethics researchers will be saying "i told you so" in a few years. but like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution, i don't think the universe is capable of withholding this kind of epoch shift.