Comment by cmiles8
9 hours ago
Honestly given how good the open weight models are getting I don’t see a viable business model for OpenAI and Anthropic anymore. The profit is in the compute, not the model. OpenAI and Anthropic spent all their money renting compute from others so yes they can sell lightweight model inference but they have a massive structural disadvantage now as others can always sell good-enough inference much cheaper.
There’s also zero stickiness to models and most companies now have their own internal routing utilities so devs and users can just keep the same API endpoint and move between models with a single line of code swap.
Unless something changes with the big labs and fast, they look pretty f*cked.
People will pay for more intelligent models. Astra and Fable are more intelligent than these open weight models and can solve problems that are much more difficult, and that's extremely valuable. It's not any more complicated than that.
> It's not any more complicated than that.
It is more complicated than that when the valuations and business plans are contingent on those companies AI having complete dominance at every level.
If companies only use frontier models for occasional difficult tasks, not only does that affect volume, it basically elminates stickiness and incentivizes companies to instead of using their products continuosly, find ways to move from the expensive stuff to the cheaper stuff.
Yes but that’s a tiny portion of AI use cases. Maybe 1-2% max. The big labs need a lot more than that to survive.
You’re assuming other model creators can’t build these mega models. Evidence is they’ve simply decided it’s a fools game to do so and they’re focused on where the use cases are.
Fable is behind Opus (which is also much cheaper) at this point in benchmarking.
I don’t know what I’m talking about but it seems to me OpenAI is heavily emphasizing productization of LLMs. Dots, ChatGPT Work, scheduled tasks, in-app projects etc.
Being able to directly distill their huge frontier models into Luna/Haiku-level models puts them a step ahead still.
i hate dario's politics, but i still find claude's eco system easier to use. Design/Artifacts is very convenient for people like me who has zero UI/UX expertise, and claude code's remote session works seamlessly on ios with a well-design client interface while you have to deal with ssh and typing in cli with your iphone keyboard if you are using opencode/omp etc
And yet, nearly all of enterprise money spent on AI tokens in the US is going to either OpenAI or Anthropic.
That trajectory appears to be changing. Virtually every company I see is shifting more and more to open weight models. Anthropic’s slowing growth rate is already spooking investors and that shift is just getting started.
That's why they are constantly fearmongering and trying to get other models outlawed. If nothing else, under the pretense of national security.