Comment by gyomu
14 hours ago
We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.
Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure.
OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.
All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.
Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.
Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..
People say deepseek is about 5 months behind frontier, they claim their final training run was 7 figures. The trail blazing is likely making it cheaper to follow not more expensive.
But do I leave all my money in US index funds?
It's the safer bet.
You are now my financial advisor
Which funds?
Searching “invest $10[0]k into USA index funds low fees”, the Vanguard funds that come up! (Vanguard sounds a little special, maybe they do good marketing. Ah, per Wiki: “Vanguard is owned by the funds managed by the company and is therefore owned by its customers.”)
Looking familiar: VTI or VOO, VTSAX or VFIAX
1 reply →
Maybe just like one of each.
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OpenAI will be the Yahoo of AI. Starting off as a household name, but fades to irrelevancy as competitors take over.
Google is much better positioned long term with their TPUs and separate enormous revenue from advertising.
Not so sure on the advertising front. B2C is now mostly social media, and Google doesn't own any. That's why the pivoted hard to YouTube shorts to try and capture that segment, but it is nowhere near TikTok or Instagram. Case in point, Meta's advertising revenue is predicted to surpass Google's this year.
You underestimate that YouTube has become what TV was for the majority of young people. Premium is relatively lucrative - but the ad revenue is insane. If Google can succeed in building an AI to generate slop to hold eyeballs fixed on the screen and cut out creators it will be a highly profitable dystopia. Facebook is similarly positioned (via Instagram - not Facebook itself) while TikTok is in a highly unpredictable state with the recent acquisition. Oracle may stay hands off and treat it as a golden goose but that hasn't been the recent track record for anyone with the surname Ellison.
So Google remains as Google
So we get ad flooded useless AIs?
That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear