ChatGPT revived the fear that one lab could capture AI

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 4:08

   Did you feel like you had something to prove or did you just feel like excited? You had like already just built something amazing. Where was your head at? I really wanted to start something new. I was kind of like feeling the itch to like, you know, have a small team in a new domain. and um and that was mostly where my head was at honestly like I um you know like OpenSea like this was before FTX um when I left um I stayed on the board um I I was you know when I wanted to like take a few months off or something but I think in like November ChatGPT launched it's about like two months after i left open sea and i was like oh sabbatical is probably over this is a crazy new thing um and and my biggest question was like is this going to be a winner take all market this because this could be like a google style monopoly where all value flows to

2. 5:17

   one company and it would be like the dutch east india trading company but like times you know a quadrillion in magnitude if all knowledge work ends up depending on one company. That seems very dangerous and very, you know, I was also curious, like, who's using the other model labs? Like, who's using anything other than OpenAI? What are they using them for? Like nobody seems to have any empirical data on any of this stuff.

3. 5:49

   and so I made like an experiment called window AI that was like kind of crypto inspired kind of like meta it was similar to MetaMask but where you'd bring your own users could like choose the model they want to use with a web app and bring their model choice directly to that that app and it allowed you know apps to kind of emerge that wanted to be model agnostic or wanted to let users use open weight models with them alpaca had had just come out which was the the first like usable open weight model i'd ever seen it was made and it only took six hundred dollars to make it it was a like a small team at stanford that um that set it up uh and it and like just fine-tuned llama using a bunch of synthetic data and i was like wow if this is possible then there's gonna be tons of these things. Maybe like thousands or tens of thousands of bottles. And it's a new

4. 6:50

   way of selling data. It's a new way of kind of, of, of like monetizing knowledge. And also creating like, yeah, it's, it's a new primitive building block for the economy. And there's, is there like a homepage? Is there any sort of like way to discover these things or any sort of place on the you know internet for them is there any sort of a way to get like high quality access to them is there a way to like compare you know the various providers that emerge over time is there a way to like monitor or you know manage observe and govern all of these things no so that's what that's how open router got started open router is growing rapidly and you guys are sort of having