Comment by skippyboxedhero
1 day ago
The long-term is considerably easier because in the short-term there are limits on supply so prices aren't really able to move in a way where balance will be found.
In the long-term, the marginal cost of a request is zero so prices will plunge and a lot of the fixed investment will get stuck. The difference between the cost of training a model/infra and serving a request from that model is a clear problem for economics.
What happens with Anthropic specifically is less clear because they, as every company in the same position in the last 150 years has done, are going to push for regulation. A lot of the risk has also been shifted onto neoclouds. The value of the customer relationship is, however, effectively zero. A core part of their strategy has been to build stuff out like CC to differentiate that but, ultimately, that won't work.
The other strategy they have employed is trying to get other companies to stop training new models. Again, seems unlikely to work.
There is no scenario in which they become Google search outside of government intervention. Obviously this is a key part of their strategy now but at best, this will only work in the US and Europe (I would actually say they are much further along in Europe where there is a strong tendency towards corporatism and centralisation of power, they could be "Europe's AI").
The only thing regulatory capture in the USA will do is to improve the situation for the rest of the world to compete. I wonder how long it will take them to figure that one out, for all their smarts they seem to be incapable of reading a history book.
This "regulatory capture" stuff mostly just exists in the imaginations of HN users anyway. This is just one reason why it never made sense as a strategy.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ai-safety-is-not-a-corporat...
> improve the situation for the rest of the world to compete
The risk is that USA and China will come together on a joint "AI non-proliferation" agreement in the same way that nuclear technology became restricted by the countries that already had the capability. This will lead to a de facto techno-colonization of the rest of the world just between themselves.
This was a topic of discussion at Trump and Xi's AI summit just last month.
Neither Xi nor Trump are going to be able to make that stick. The cat is well out of the bag by now.
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It just doesn't really make much sense. It's way harder to stop a company in a country which hasn't signed it (not that the congress ever would sign a random document Trump and Xi come up with regardless...) from developing a model than from building nukes. Also if American and Chinese labs stop development it would make it cheaper and easier for others to catch up.
Although I agree inference will become cheap (probably not zero), it's quite possible that there is a moat they can build around understanding customer context.
With each query OpenAI and Anthropic get more context about their users. When I compare answers between AIs the ChatGPT answer often includes useful things it inferred from earlier conversations. Losing that context could be a meaningful barrier for a customer to switch to a cheaper service.
> With each query OpenAI and Anthropic get more context about their users.
Not unless they break their own TOS. The temptation must be very large to do so and is probably why those settings keep mysteriously shifting back to 'yes, I give all my data to you to do with as you please'.
I don't think that's what GP meant. I think the point is maybe they could build a moat by "knowing you" in a way that makes you care about using Claude rather than, say, Gemini.
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Wild how even when humanity achieves a level of abundance there’s somehow a need from a few on wall st to create artificial scarcity.
They can't help themselves. They all saw that movie and figure they can be stars too.