Comment by daft_pink
5 hours ago
This really reinforces the idea that the AI race and the Railroad Mania of the 19th century are very similar.
So many different companies are going to have similarly powerful ai that there will be no moat around it and it will be cheap. They will never earn their investment back.
I suspect this is the real reason behind Anthropic limiting subscriptions to their own products and keeping API prices several times higher than comparable models. Applications more sticky than API users and less technical users more sticky than programmers (ie Cowork more sticky than Code).
Anthropic generally seem more into living within market discipline and market signals of some sort. Products with margins, even if it's sort of irrelevant considering R&D costs and capital inflow.
That said, there's nothing like the real thing.
The risk is something like the railroad bubble and the dotcom. Over-investement, circular revenue and a timeline that doesn't work.
Or, maybe it'll work out.
What people seem to miss is that they don't need to get the investment back from people, they will get it from machines.
Could you explain how you think that's going to work? Because to me it seems that until machines have bank accounts, there's no money for them to get.
The moat is in the compute and the energy access.
And further down the line in chips, which is why Elon is building a fab now.
There are plenty of capable models on HuggingFace, yet I have no way of running them.
Give it a few years, or month. Tiny models are getting outrageously good
I wonder if this is why the tech cartel is buying up all the hardware?
If the average user gets convinced they could run LLMs for cheap at home, you cannot trap users in your walled garden anymore.
Exactly. We’ll see the cost of AI continue to drop.
I was saying this for years about Tesla’s FSD - they finally had to give in and drop the price to stay competitive.
1 reply →
That fab will never be delivered. In five years you might see the manufacturing equivalent of a person dancing in spandex.
> which is why Elon is building a fab now
At least he says he's doing that. It doesn't really make sense since you're not going to achieve an advanced node from a standing start in a practical time frame and cost.
Sounds like more Musk flavored vapor.
> It doesn't really make sense since you're not going to achieve an advanced node from a standing start in a practical time frame and cost.
They already announced a partnership with Intel.
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Nah. Everybody is talking about ai. Everybody is using it. It's by far the most popular new tool human beings are using currently. As popular as mobile phones or spoons. And maybe as disruptive as the steam engines. AI companies are becoming the largest software companies on the planet. Everything points into that direction. Trillions of dollars are waiting in the market to be collected.
Based on what? A lot of this is vibes and FOMO; just like any economic bubble.
There is no objective evidence of anything you’ve said. It isn’t even clear if AI has contributed positively to global economic growth. It reminds me a lot of the late 90s and the dot-com mania. Slapping a domain on a commercial would make your stock go up even if there was no substance to any of it.
The real shame is this mania drowns out serious, practical use cases because when the bubble collapses, the market will throw the baby out with the bathwater.