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A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.
At minimum they have the ability to produce lots of synthetic data to train future models with, now they have this newer and cheaper model. And they have far more compute than before.
Same with Anthropic. Where is Opus 3.5? Hidden from us mere mortals.
Wasn't this explicit when OpenAI announced Sora but gave no public access?
They surely have some impressive stuff that isn't even revealed yet.
To a large extent I would expect them to keep ChatGPT as the flagship product and any upgrades would just be added on as features rather than "separate" models.
I am wondering if they've lost first-mover advantage, since any other companies that were sniffing around the same research-space surely know where to direct efforts now, even if they haven't stolen IP directly.
My bet is on OpenAI having a couple sizeable rabbits to pull out of their hat, but they could be true witchcraft or mere illusions.
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I'll admit that this thought has occurred to me. But given everything we know about human nature, do you think anyone could keep something of this magnitude under wraps?
The criminal mastermind always longs to confess his crimes so we can marvel at how clever he is.
Probably not indefinitely, but it is at least possible to keep something of that magnitude under wraps for a long time and effectively enough that the few occasional whistleblowers get dismissed as cranks or ignored until finally one day something comes out that is too big to be swept under the rug. Take the NSA domestic surveillance program, for example. It was successfully kept secret from the public for many years.
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