Comment by observationist
8 hours ago
The labs have fully embraced the cutthroat competition, the arms race has fully shed the civilized facade of beneficient mutual cooperation.
Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics will happen - I think Demis isn't savvy in this domain, but might end up stomping out the competition on pure performance.
Elon, Sam, and Dario know how to fight ugly and do the nasty political boardroom crap. 26 is gonna be a very dramatic year, lots of cinematic potential for the eventual AI biopics.
>civilized facade of mutual cooperation
>Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics
As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.
> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.
The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.
The consumers are getting huge wins.
Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves.
Competition is fantastic.
> Model costs continue to collapse
And yet RAM prices are still sky high. Game consoles are getting more expensive, not cheaper, as a result. When will competition benefit those consumers? Or consumers of desktop RAM?
> The consumers are getting huge wins.
However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.
Yes, but not cutthroat competition that implies unsustainable, detrimental competition that kills off the industry.
Sure, it can be beneficial. But don't forget that externalities are a thing.
in the short term maybe, in the long term it depends how many winners you have. If only two, the market will be a duopoly. Customers will get better AI but will have zero power over the way the AI is produced or consumed (i.e. cO2 emission, ethics, etc will be burnt)
> how many winners ... duopoly
There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.
> CO₂ emissions
Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources on pure $/kWh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the cheap clean sources cannot service today.