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Comment by adventured

13 hours ago

Your premise is wrong in a very important way.

The cost of entry is far beyond extraordinary. You're acting like anybody can gain entry, when the exact opposite is the case. The door is closing right now. Just try to compete with OpenAI, let's see you calculate the price of attempting it. Scale it to 300, 500, 800 million users.

Why aren't there a dozen more Anthropics, given the valuation in question (and potential IPO)? Because it'll cost you tens of billions of dollars just to try to keep up. Nobody will give you that money. You can't get the GPUs, you can't get the engineers, you can't get the dollars, you can't build the datacenters. Hell, you can't even get the RAM these days, nor can you afford it.

Google & Co are capturing the market and will monetize it with advertising. They will generate trillions of dollars in revenue over the coming 10-15 years by doing so.

The barrier to entry is the same one that exists in search: it'll cost you well over one hundred billion dollars to try to be in the game at the level that Gemini will be at circa 2026-2027, for just five years.

Please, inform me of where you plan to get that one hundred billion dollars just to try to keep up. Even Anthropic is going to struggle to stay in the competition when the music (funding bubble) stops.

There are maybe a dozen or so companies in existence that can realistically try to compete with the likes of Gemini or GPT.

> Just try to compete with OpenAI, let's see you calculate the price of attempting it. Scale it to 300, 500, 800 million users.

Apparently the DeepSeek folks managed that feat. Even with the high initial barriers to entry you're talking about, there will always be ways to compete by specializing in some underserved niche and growing from there. Competition seems to be alive and well.

  • DeepSeek certainly managed that on the training side but in terms of inference, the actual product was unusably slow and unreliable at launch and for several months after. I have not bothered revisiting it.

    • Are you talking about the model or their service? There's plenty of options for using their models other than the official DeepSeek API.