>It just needs to be plausible enough that OpenAI can make a reasonable case for continuing investment at the levels it's historically attained
>there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment.
But, this still seems to be a problem for OpenAI. Who wants to invest "substantially" in a company whose output can be used by competitors to build an equal or better offering for orders of magnitude less?
Seems they'd need to make that copyright stick. But, that's a very tall and ironic order, given how OpenAI obtained its data in the first place.
There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.
>There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.
Is there a scenario where it isn’t?
Either (1) a competitor is able to do it better without their work or (2) a competitor is able to use their output and develop a better product.
Either way, given the costs, how do you justify investing in OpenAI if the competitor is going to eat their lunch and you’ll never get a return on your investment?
The scenario to which I was alluding assumed the latter (2) and, further, that OpenAI was unable to prevent that—either technically or legally (i.e. via IP protection).
More specifically, on the legal side I don't see how they can protect their output without stepping on their own argument for ingesting everyone else's. And, if that were to indeed prove impossible, then that would be the catastrophic scenario.
On your point (1), I don't think that's necessarily catastrophic. That's just good old-fashioned competition, and OpenAI would have to simply best them on R&D.
>there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment.
But, this still seems to be a problem for OpenAI. Who wants to invest "substantially" in a company whose output can be used by competitors to build an equal or better offering for orders of magnitude less?
Seems they'd need to make that copyright stick. But, that's a very tall and ironic order, given how OpenAI obtained its data in the first place.
There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.