> So how exactly is Anthropic and OpenAI ever going to pay back the trillions that they plan on spending?
It's really simple: if they truly get to human-level AI (or even superhuman AI), then money and debts no longer matter, since our current economic system will be obsolete. They are betting everything on this outcome.
I don't know if they will manage to do it before their debts have to be repaid, but considering the rate of acceleration in the past few months, there is a non-trivial chance that they will, IMHO. We will see.
I would perhaps agree with you just a year ago. But now I am not so sure. It is clear that scaling up Transformers still leads to significant improvements, and they are now solving math conjectures and finding real vulnerabilites in software. We don't really know where the capability ceiling of the current approach is, and anyone telling you that we know it is lying to you.
No need even for "human-level" per se. It just has to be useful enough that it upends the current economic order, which it's already well on the way into doing.
1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
so, surely chinese AI providers also lost money making new models, but they are not spending nearly as much as US ones.
>1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
>2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
Both arguments make it seem like there's a double standard for american vs chinese AI companies, where american labs are held up to strict standards for profitability, but chinese labs get a pass because [insert handwaving about how some aspect of chinese labs is different]. Let's do apples to apples comparisons here, what are both sides' run rates and revenue growth prospects?
>3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
Right, instead they're releasing their models for free so competitors can undercut them on inference. American labs' prospect of "there are open models 90% as good but cost less" might seem bad, but chinese labs' prospect of "there are companies offering the exact same models but aren't on the hook for r&d spend" seems even worse.
Literally nothing is known about how these companies are financed. The usual story is that Moonshot was chosen when 'Mythos' occasioned a huge state crisis. China is the ascended masters of insane amounts of capital poured into whatever the state takes into its head next.
By charging $$$ like they do now and having a non terminal business model.
PRC AI have lower opex and capex, i.e. export controls means they couldn't be trillions in the hole on inflated hardware in the first place. They only need to extract a few 10s of billions from domestic market have a healthy runway. If investors/gov wants to throw in a few billion to treat as utility, whatever, it's still rounding error.
Dirt cheap Chinese solar is a competitive advantage just sitting there waiting, but instead the US is trying to revive coal, restart a grossly ineffective small scale nuclear system with immensely bad fuel utilization, and spending billions to cancel renewable projects that were already approved. I'm so tired of these insurrectionist dog traitors to this country I love.
just like there were mistrals, coheres, llamas, etc, there will be new deepseeks and moonshots if those ever flame out (worst case, given out at cost by google, meta, alibaba or etc)
OpenAI and Anthropic are already in a ~200bil hole from previous model iterations and are committing to trillions of additional spending
OpenAI spent more TBPN than kimi spent on training K3
They are by all accounts, not. Z.ai for instance is a public company according to wikipedia. Moonshot AI is private but all their investors are private companies. Alibaba, as we all know, is a massive publicly traded tech conglomerate.
Moreover even if we take the more charitable view that they're controlled by the CCP, and therefore will continue releasing models for free, that seems as questionable as the prospect that private investors will continue shoveling money into anthropic/openai.
By charging $$$ like they do now and having a non terminal business model. PRC AI have lower opex and capex, i.e. export controls means they couldn't be trillions in the hole on inflated hardware in the first place. They only need to extract a few 10s of billions from domestic market have a healthy runway. If investors/gov wants to throw in a few billion to treat as utility, whatever, it's still rounding error.
Shoveling 70% less money into a money pit is still shoveling money into a money pit. Not to mention that at least openai/anthropic has better prospects of making back the money because their models are proprietary, and won't be cannibalized by other companies serving the exact same models.
I expect they're going to fight each other to become the vendor of record for the government, and whoever wins will get bailed out. This is one area where they don't have to worry about competition from Chinese models.
Its more Google Amazon Meta Microsoft who are spending trillions. They will be fine. So will Anthropic and OpenAI. Nvidia will presumably survive. The losses are all the real estate interests and contractors and contributory hardware companies etc.
I think most of us can see that the level of corruption we are seeing with the administration is quite historical. You can’t simply say “both administrations engaged in corruption” and consider the matter closed. Scale matters.
> So how exactly is Anthropic and OpenAI ever going to pay back the trillions that they plan on spending?
It's really simple: if they truly get to human-level AI (or even superhuman AI), then money and debts no longer matter, since our current economic system will be obsolete. They are betting everything on this outcome.
I don't know if they will manage to do it before their debts have to be repaid, but considering the rate of acceleration in the past few months, there is a non-trivial chance that they will, IMHO. We will see.
That’s like building F1 cars and thinking you will soon have a rocket to land on the moon.
LLM has nothing to do with AGI.
I would perhaps agree with you just a year ago. But now I am not so sure. It is clear that scaling up Transformers still leads to significant improvements, and they are now solving math conjectures and finding real vulnerabilites in software. We don't really know where the capability ceiling of the current approach is, and anyone telling you that we know it is lying to you.
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That's assuming that human-level AI is a possibility with current approaches.
No need even for "human-level" per se. It just has to be useful enough that it upends the current economic order, which it's already well on the way into doing.
No, it's assuming there's a non-trivial chance that they will.
I'd assume we want at least human-level intelligence, but better than human-level _decision making_. ;)
You could ask the same about how z.ai, moonshot ai, minimax, and alibaba are going to continue training and releasing models for free.
1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
so, surely chinese AI providers also lost money making new models, but they are not spending nearly as much as US ones.
>1. they still have revenue though. it might not enough to cover all the r&d but it is surely enough to cover the hardware cost.
>2. people tend to ignore this, but the salary budget of a US frontier lab and chinese frontier lab is nowhere comparable, the first can easily outdone the later by 100x.
Both arguments make it seem like there's a double standard for american vs chinese AI companies, where american labs are held up to strict standards for profitability, but chinese labs get a pass because [insert handwaving about how some aspect of chinese labs is different]. Let's do apples to apples comparisons here, what are both sides' run rates and revenue growth prospects?
>3. us labs, like other US style startups, always throw ton of money to capture the market. I don't see the chinese company doing the same scheme at all.
Right, instead they're releasing their models for free so competitors can undercut them on inference. American labs' prospect of "there are open models 90% as good but cost less" might seem bad, but chinese labs' prospect of "there are companies offering the exact same models but aren't on the hook for r&d spend" seems even worse.
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Literally nothing is known about how these companies are financed. The usual story is that Moonshot was chosen when 'Mythos' occasioned a huge state crisis. China is the ascended masters of insane amounts of capital poured into whatever the state takes into its head next.
By charging $$$ like they do now and having a non terminal business model.
PRC AI have lower opex and capex, i.e. export controls means they couldn't be trillions in the hole on inflated hardware in the first place. They only need to extract a few 10s of billions from domestic market have a healthy runway. If investors/gov wants to throw in a few billion to treat as utility, whatever, it's still rounding error.
Dirt cheap Chinese solar is a competitive advantage just sitting there waiting, but instead the US is trying to revive coal, restart a grossly ineffective small scale nuclear system with immensely bad fuel utilization, and spending billions to cancel renewable projects that were already approved. I'm so tired of these insurrectionist dog traitors to this country I love.
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just like there were mistrals, coheres, llamas, etc, there will be new deepseeks and moonshots if those ever flame out (worst case, given out at cost by google, meta, alibaba or etc)
OpenAI and Anthropic are already in a ~200bil hole from previous model iterations and are committing to trillions of additional spending
OpenAI spent more TBPN than kimi spent on training K3
They are owned by the state, so the economics are a bit different.
>They are owned by the state
They are by all accounts, not. Z.ai for instance is a public company according to wikipedia. Moonshot AI is private but all their investors are private companies. Alibaba, as we all know, is a massive publicly traded tech conglomerate.
Moreover even if we take the more charitable view that they're controlled by the CCP, and therefore will continue releasing models for free, that seems as questionable as the prospect that private investors will continue shoveling money into anthropic/openai.
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By charging $$$ like they do now and having a non terminal business model. PRC AI have lower opex and capex, i.e. export controls means they couldn't be trillions in the hole on inflated hardware in the first place. They only need to extract a few 10s of billions from domestic market have a healthy runway. If investors/gov wants to throw in a few billion to treat as utility, whatever, it's still rounding error.
At a fraction of the cost.
Shoveling 70% less money into a money pit is still shoveling money into a money pit. Not to mention that at least openai/anthropic has better prospects of making back the money because their models are proprietary, and won't be cannibalized by other companies serving the exact same models.
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Socialize the lost.They dont have to. You pay.
I expect they're going to fight each other to become the vendor of record for the government, and whoever wins will get bailed out. This is one area where they don't have to worry about competition from Chinese models.
Its more Google Amazon Meta Microsoft who are spending trillions. They will be fine. So will Anthropic and OpenAI. Nvidia will presumably survive. The losses are all the real estate interests and contractors and contributory hardware companies etc.
Why do you think tech oligarchs have been cozying up to the Trump admin? They're angling for a government bailout, paid for by your tax money!
Thy cozy up to whoever is in government. They cozy'd up with Biden too.
That's true. But it's been a while since an admin was as brazenly corrupt and the cozying up was so promising.
I think most of us can see that the level of corruption we are seeing with the administration is quite historical. You can’t simply say “both administrations engaged in corruption” and consider the matter closed. Scale matters.