Sherwin Wu, Head of Engineering for OpenAI's Developer Platform, contrasts the development speed of image models with text models during a conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sherman Wu: AI industry will shift toward specialized models
“It's, like, becoming increasingly clear that there will be room for a bunch of specialized models. There will likely be a proliferation of other types of models.”
Assertion Supported
Sherman Wu: ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users
“The first party app is a really great way to get, you know it was like eight hundred million wows or whatever now.”
Disclosure
Sherman Wu: OpenAI previously believed a single model would replace fine-tuning
“I remember like, even with an open AI, the thinking was that there would be like one model that rules them all. And it's like, why would you, I mean, like this kind of goes to the fine tuning API product. It's like, why would you even have a fine tuning produc…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sherman Wu: OpenAI prices its API services using a cost-plus model
“Internally, one thing we do is, is we always make sure that we actually price our usage-based pricing from a, like, cost-plus perspective. Like, we're actually just, like, trying to make sure that we're being responsible from a margin perspective.”
Insight
Sherman Wu: Usage-based pricing naturally approximates outcome-based pricing in AI
“On outcome-based pricing it sounds very appealing, like, if it can work, but one thing that we've started realizing is it actually ends up correlating quite a bit with usage-based pricing, especially with test time compute. Like, if the thing is just, like, th…”
What-if
Sherman Wu: Replicating OpenAI's flagship model inference performance is extremely hard
“Even if we just like, you know, open source, like if we just literally open sourced GPT-V or something, it would be really, really hard to inference it at the level that we are able to get it to do.”