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Ask HN: Are you reconsidering building on top of OpenAI Products/APIs?

2 pointsby NameErrorover 1 year ago
My view of OpenAI has previously been that they&#x27;re basically a successful startup, building and selling products - because despite the odd nonprofit ownership structure, they seemed to be -acting- more like a startup than anything else.<p>I guess I was a bit confused and off-put by the shift from &quot;open&quot; to a more corporate looking direction (MSFT partnership, paid plans etc). But I basically just accepted that they&#x27;re a product company now, and they do make best-in-class AI products at the moment.<p>Given yesterday&#x27;s news, it looks like a lot of insiders were unhappy about that direction and things are potentially going to change. If you&#x27;re building on top of OpenAI, are you worried? Worried that the APIs will go away, or that time invested into systems like plugins&#x2F;GPTs will be wasted after OpenAI pulls support for their more product-y things?

2 comments

campaign_toolsover 1 year ago
I think sound advice is not to rely too much on any one company now. I founded an AI-based startup that is harnessing LLMs with RAG to do cool stuff. My guiding philosophy when designing it was to be agnostic as much as possible. And so far that&#x27;s worked out.<p>I can send my prompts to multiple different LLMs. My embeddings are mine, for the most part. I have the raw content, so I can always re-embed them if I decide I no longer want to use Cohere or OpenAI. There&#x27;s also self-hosted vector embeddings using things like Huggingface models.<p>And in terms of vector databases for RAG? Those are mostly open source, so I&#x27;m not worried there. The truth is that LLMs are in an arms-race right now, so staying flexible is just a good business model.<p>If anything the firing of Sam just confirmed that I have made the right decision by maintaining flexibility. Relying too much on any one of these companies early on could be dangerous.
mvkelover 1 year ago
Not reconsidering at all. Building right now is simply riding the wave.<p>The alternative is sitting on the sidelines and waiting until things &quot;settle,&quot; but will miss out on years of experiencing the evolution of these apis.<p>It&#x27;s skill building as much as anything else.<p>Nobody can monetize wrapper apps at any meaningful scale anyway because rate limits and costs per prompt are too high.