Comment by sandworm101
20 hours ago
Today. As new supply comes online and demand levels off, that 38$ will shrink. Absent legal monopolies, the margin will shrink to a sliver more similar to any other service. That is the danger of open source models. They destroy monopolies and shrink margins.
> That is the danger of open source models. They destroy monopolies and shrink margins.
Danger? You mean benefit?
That would depend on whether you are a user/customer or an investor/owner in AI. At the moment, nearly everyone is on the investor/owner side. The entire western world has doubled down on AI becoming the most popular product since the invention of fire. If it turns out that fire 2.0 cannot be patented/copyrighted/licensed for insane profits, those dollars disappear.
The people who own these companies have more money than they, their families, and their extended families can spend for generations. None of them have to work a day in their life no matter what happens to these companies.
Same with a lot of their investors, who will be just fine without the "insane profits" they hope for.
I'm not worried about their welfare, and won't shed a tear if their companies collapse.
3 replies →
> The entire western world has doubled down on AI becoming the most popular product since the invention of fire.
That's a bit of a one-sided view.
8 replies →
> nearly everyone is on the investor/owner side
I think that "everyone" needs some kind of an asterisk. Who's "everyone" in this?
Depends if you’re a shareholder or not
> That is the danger of open source models. They destroy monopolies and shrink margins.
It's unclear that the leading open-source models could exist without having distilled the frontier models. If that's true, the "danger" is that these upstream models don't get built any more (because of the tremendous cost), and we end up just optimizing what we have. Also unclear whether this would be a net win or loss for humanity.
The tech is at the point where synthetic data is almost high enough quality to train further models on, AND there are so many human users of cloud AI, that their usage can be gathered and trained upon (it's human generated and used in real world situations, so, it is of a good enough quality). The cat is fully out of the bag.
This deals with half of one of the three scaling factors only. Presumably data production (choosing your training data, etc), model size, and training time/power still contribute huge costs. Who's investing that cash if open-source models will distill out enough to compete without the investment costs?
1 reply →
The upstream models weren't built by god, they were built by distilling the world's knowledge and cultural products.
If OpenAI/Anthropic stop doing it there's no reason to believe someone else won't. Or that we won't come up with a different approach.
> they were built by distilling the world's knowledge and cultural products
... and a bunch of RLHF and proprietary training data etc etc, but regardless, this is still an exceptionally expensive process, that someone somewhere is paying for.
I'm OK with this.
Anthropic is zooming to $100 billion in annualized revenue.
The tremendous cost is matched by the tremendous business output.
In the span of less than five years, starting from their first $1 of revenue, Anthropic + OpenAI will have produced businesses doing at least $150 billion in combined sales. The demand isn't reducing at present, it's climbing, they can't come close to servicing the total demand for their frontier models.
SAP is under $40 billion in annualized revenue. They're 54 years old.
If SAP sold $1 bills for $0.50, they too could rapidly outpace Anthro/OAI's growth. And when sane minds ask about profits or a defensive moat, the response is "but look at our revenue bro".
3 replies →
According to who? There is no agreed upon anyone that says that?
It is mostly response to claims of "all LLM are subsidized and blatant bubble, LLM are useless" etc
All LLM are subsidized and blatant bubble.
If the only profit is from running commodity free software (as OP claims), there's no moat and OpenAI/Anthropic are worthless.