Comment by Gormo
5 days ago
> I'm probably losing it, but just based on OpenAI's behavior and public communications, it seems to me they want to be taken over by the government?
Well, as people say over and over again, they've got no moat. The actual LLM models are destined to be commoditized over time, and the real money is in the hardware to run them on. The endgame winners are going to be Nvidia and AMD, not Anthropic or OpenAI.
So what's the typical playbook for large firms seeking to insulate themselves against market compensation? Push for regulation. If there are no natural barriers to entry, create artificial ones. And how do you get regulation passed? Present yourself as the target of the regulation, rather than its beneficiary, and start publicly doing things that make others think you need to be reined in.
These stunts, especially from OpenAI, aren't just trying to hype up the power of their own product, they're trying to hype up the perceived threat of the entire category, so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.
> so they can provoke political intervention that they can comply with, but few others can.
See Meta et al complaining about Section 230 of the DMCA. Meta would be entirely able to moderate in an environment where mass scale moderation/censorship would be required to prevent a host's liability for UGC. Almost no one else would be able to do so.
That means no upstart could possible come along to dethrone Meta as they did with MySpace. It would also be impractical to run a FOSS social network (or forums). Meta could literally just have bots sign up on a FOSS social network until its DAU count ran over the statutory minimums to be subject to UGC liability.
Regulatory capture is a de facto ban on competition in a market.
That is not actually a typical playbook. Normal businesses do not want to be regulated, and will fight it tooth and nail. So regulation happens when bad things happen, the public wants change, and the businesses can't fight it or set favorable terms. (At most they can minimize the badness of the terms). Regulatory capture happens much later, and slowly. It's not where you start at.
> That is not actually a typical playbook. Normal businesses do not want to be regulated, and will fight it tooth and nail.
Sure. If you exclude, for example, the entire automotive industry, the entire telecom industry, the entire airline industry, the entire energy industry, and the entire healthcare industry from the category of "normal businesses" then you can perhaps make an argument that most "normal businesses" do not want to be regulated.
> Regulatory capture happens much later, and slowly.
Regulatory capture often happens quite early, especially when new technologies emerge, and companies that are successful early on aim to consolidate their hold on the market. This happened with the telephone industry around the turn of the 20th century, the broadcasting industry starting in the 1920s, etc. Regulation always tends toward market consolidation, so the people who are aiming for market consolidation tend to advocate for it. And sometimes the most effective advocacy is pretending to oppose it.
and Google. Don't forget them and TPUs...
Its pretty clear OAI and Ant live in fantasy land - the US govt doesnt care if they go bust. There's plenty of other tech firms that generate immense cash flows from operations who they can be sold to - no problem. And the shareholders and employees have no right to be pissed - they invested/ accepted SBC knowing there is immense risk.
The private market price is irrelevant - supply and demand determines what they will be sold for in liquidation.
Quite frankly Im bored of this drama. Get it over with already - go IPO, show your financials, find a path to being a healthy going concern or die! Simple! Nobody has a divine right to exist.
> Nobody has a divine right to exist. No company*