Comment by dragonwriter
9 hours ago
> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?
Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields.
Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.
To dominate the real world, you need correcting feedback loop from reality. These feedback loops and regulations (in medical and other industries) take long time to come back with good signals. So you are still time bound by how fast your experiments are.
It's not clear to me that one horse-sized AI allows you to outcompete 100 duck-sized AIs in use by everyone else once you factor in the non-intelligence contributions that the others with weaker AIs bring to the table.
There's a lot more to building a successful product than how smart your engineers/agents are, how many engineers/agents you have, and capital.
Google, for example, can be extremely dysfunctional at launching new products despite unimaginably vast resources. They often lack intangible elements to success, such as empathizing with your customers' needs.
If we were in a world where AI was not already widespread, then I would agree that having strong AI would be an immense competitive advantage. However, in a world where "good enough" AI is increasingly widespread, the competitive advantage of strong AI diminishes as time goes on.
Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness.
That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, as the models (and harnesses) get better, the number of fields SOTA model owners could dominate overnight, continues to grow.
(One possible trigger would be the open models. As long as the gap between SOTA and open is constant or decreasing, there will be a point where SOTA operators might be forced to cannibalize the software industry by a third party with an open model and access to infra pulling the trigger first.)
Don't open models and competition between frontier providers both serve as barriers here? If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else. They'd need a sufficient advantage to pull out far ahead of everyone else before others had a chance to react in a meaningful way. Otherwise the competitors that absorbed all your subscriptions would stack that much more hardware and continue to challenge you.
I think meaningful change to the current equilibrium would require at absolute minimum the proprietary equivalent of the development of the transformer architecture.
> If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else.
Integration, and mindset. AI, by its general-purpose nature, subsumes software products. Most products today try to integrate AI inside, put it in a box and use to supercharge the product - whereas it's becoming obvious even for non-technical users, that AI is better on the outside, using the product for you. This gives the SOTA AI companies an advantage over everyone else - they're on the outside, and can assimilate products into their AI ecosystem - like the Borg collective, adding their distinctiveness to their own - and reaping outsized and compounding benefits from deep interoperability between the new capability and everything else the AI could already do.
Once one SOTA AI company starts this process, the way I see it, it's the end-game for the industry. The only players that can compete with it are the other SOTA AI companies - but this will just be another race, with nearly-equivalent offerings trading spots in benchmarks/userbase every other month - and that race starts with rapidly cannibalizing the entire software industry, as each provider wants to add new capabilities first, for a momentary advantage.
Once this process starts, I see no way for it to be stopped. Software products will stop being a thing.
Open models can't compete, because they're always lagging proprietary. What they do, however, is ensure the above happens - because if, for some reason SOTA AI companies stick to only supplying "digital smarts a service" for everyone, someone with access to sufficient compute infra is bound to eventually try the end-game strategy with an open model, hoping to get a big payday before SOTA companies respond in kind.
Either way, the way I see it, software industry as we know it is already living on borrowed time.
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