David Hsu: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think a lot of people, like you said, we all build software. So we expect that everybody else is building software for other people. But most people just want to use the software that we build out here. I think the last big bucket is like models breakdown. 80% of people use it, just use OpenAI. Some might experiment with smaller models. Any insights from your experience at Retool, like building some of the AI features? Have you guys thought about using open source models? Have you thought about fine tuning models for specific use cases? Or have you just found GPT-4 to just be great at most tasks? Yeah, so two things. One is that from a data privacy perspective, people are getting more and more okay with using a hosted model like a GPT-4, for example. Especially because GPT-4 or OpenAI often has to have enterprises who went to some companies already because I think a lot of CIOs are just like, let's get a second house. Like, you know, let's use Azure, for example. And, you know, let's make it available for employees to experiment with. So I do think there is more acceptance, if you will, today of feeding data into GPT. That's going to take some sensitive data. People might not want to do so. Like, you know, feeding in like earnings results data, you know, three days for you to announce earnings, like probably is a bad idea. You probably don't want people to be writing your like earnings statement for you. So yeah, there's still some challenges like that. But I think actually open source models could actually help solve like a lot of greed when it comes to, and that can be exciting. So that's maybe just one thought. The second thought is, I think OpenAI has been really quite smart with their pricing. And they've been pretty aggressive of like, let's get, you know, let's create this model and sell it at a pretty cheap price to make it such that there's no reason for you to use any other model. Just from like a strategy perspective, I don't know if that's going to work. And the reason for that is you have really well-funded players like Google or like Facebook, for example, that are actually quite interested. I think if it was creating startups, OpenAI would win for sure. Like at this point, OpenAI so far had from both a model and a pricing perspective that like there was no reason for it to go just really, I think, in my opinion, at least a startup model. But if like, you know, Facebook is not going to give up on AI, like Facebook is investing a lot in AI, in fact. And so competing against a large FANG company on making a model open source, I think that is challenging. Now, however, where we are right now is I think GPT-4 so far in terms of performance and I would say a model performance is so important right now because like the average, I'm not going to argue LLAMA-2 is actually so far behind, but like customers don't want to use LLAMA-2 because it's so far behind right now. And so that I think is part of the challenge. As AI progress slows down, so if we get like LLAMA-4 and LLAMA-5, for example, maybe it's a comparable at that point like GPT-5 or GPT-6, like it may get to the point where it's like, look, I just want to use LLAMA. Like it's safer for me to host it on-prem, it's just as fast, just as cheap, like why not basically? But I think right now we are in this state, we're opening up next year really well, I think. And right now they're thriving, but let's see what happens in the next year or two. What are you going to ask differently for the next survey? Like what info do you really actually want to know that's going to change your worldview?…

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