OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: AI for the Next Era [the middle layer]

The whole interview is interesting, but I was particularly struck by Altman’s comments about a “middle layer” model, between the so-called Foundation models and specific end-using applications. These remarks start at about c. 2:55:

I think there will be a small handful of like fundamental large models out there that other people build on. But right now what happens is you know company makes large language model API other people build on top of it. And I think there will be a middle layer that becomes really important where uh...I'm like skeptical of all of the startups that are trying to sort of train their own models. I don't think that's going to keep going.

But what I think will happen is there'll be a whole new set of startups that take an existing very large model of the future and tune it, uh which is not just fine-tuning like all the things you can do. I think there will be a lot of access provided to create the model for medicine or using a computer or like the kind of like friend, or whatever. And then those those companies will create a lot of enduring value because they will have like a special version of... They won't have to have created the base model but they will have created something they can use just for themselves or share with others that has this unique data flywheel going that sort of improves over time and all of that. So I think there will be a lot of value created in that middle layer.

Near the end we get a question from the audience at about 33:34:

Question: How could a large language model startup differentiate from another?

Altman: I think it'll be this middle layer um I think in some sense the startups will train their own models, just not from the beginning. uh They will take like you know base models that are like hugely trained with a gigantic amount of compute and data and then they will train on top of those to create you know the model for each vertical. And that those startups so in some sense they are training their own models just not from scratch but they're doing the one percent of training that really matters for for whatever this use case is going to be. Those startups I think they will be hugely successful and very differentiated startups there.