I do agree that OpenAI has opened up an ecosystem unlike anything offered by anyone else, but they are very restrictive with their best and newest products that tend to go exclusively to wealthy clients, not their general community. Like as a small team leader, when I’ve inquired about access to non-public services, I’ve never even gotten so much as a piss-off out of them. When my team applied for enterprise, we didn’t even get the automated spam telling us some canned crap like I got from Claude, you just get nothing from them.
Nothing speaks quite so loudly to a company when you request to give them your money and their lack of reply rather loudly reminds you that you don’t even have enough money for them to waste the time to tell you they don’t want it.
As a whole, I haven’t seen better than ChatGPT/OpenAI, but I’d go where the best resources and opportunities for what I do exist, first and foremost is the service I’m getting, I don’t care enough about any company to care what name is on the product. It’s not like if I go use some other LLM for a while and things switch around so I come back, ChatGPT is not going to be like “You cheated on me with another model so I’m not taking you back!”
I’ve run my own open-source LLM at home. I’m too cheap to invest the money into the GPUs to make it viable though. You get an idea for how much privilege we have with ChatGPT when you submit a prompt, then you can go make a sandwich and come back to see the response. One GPU good enough to make a strong open-source LLM responsive is more than I’ll pay for ChatGPT in the next several years and one GPU isn’t really that much unless you’re springing for the top of the top-of-the-line, which you’re paying big bucks for.
The LLMs I’ve built, trained, and worked with from open-source were only to get the experience. I can’t build anything that would touch ChatGPT-4 for a price I’d consider paying even for personal use, and I don’t have the kind of money they lose to throw into something like that.
They’re fun to learn and experiment with, but you need serious cash if you want to do anything serious with them.
I’d personally be happy just to be able to pay to use ChatGPT Enterprise without needing a rich corporate overlord. Even knowing I’d be paying a lot more, I’d be okay with it because I also know the difference in results.