Comment by labrador
2 days ago
What happens if Anthropic becomes a specialized high intelligence company because they can't afford the build out. Claude would be like an expensive Bloomberg Terminal or an investment letter that offers valuable and expensive intelligence.
I think about this because I pay $100/mo for Fable. How much more would I be willing to pay? I'm not sure yet. It depends on how smart the AI in the future becomes.
> would be like an expensive Bloomberg Terminal or an investment letter that offers valuable and expensive intelligence.
Whether it's Anthropic or not, I think it's inevitable some highly specialized offerings will emerge. I suspect there are already some incredibly sophisticated, hyper-narrow, astronomically expensive models being created for private in-house use.
As an imaginary example, I wouldn't be shocked if some company like Jane Street is secretly investing a billion dollars to create the highly specialized synthetic RLVR data needed to train an AI that gives them an average .08% edge on a certain kind of commodity, equity or asset trade. If so, it's not a leap to imagine another company spending $100M on a model that gives a .008% edge and selling access to 100 high-volume institutional traders for $2M each.
Expanding general purpose LLMs to incorporate increasingly specific use cases has, so far, seemed to be economically viable but I don't see a fundamental reason that must remain true for incredibly narrow yet ultra high-value domains requiring monumental bespoke development, data, etc to profitably exploit.
> As an imaginary example, I wouldn't be shocked if some company like Jane Street is secretly investing a billion dollars to create the highly specialized synthetic RLVR data needed to train an AI that gives them an average .08% edge on a certain kind of commodity, equity or asset trade.
The crazy thing is ... it's not imaginary, nor is secret, it's literally a video on YouTube from five months ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J-GUnfSqeE (though that facility is only showing of ~$200 million worth of compute).
Being a specialized firm might work if they didn’t have $700 bn in commitments.
Already they have exclusive deals with trading firms who pay $$$ for faster models and more features. But there are only so many firms who will pay that much (and a lot of companies are pulling back on spend, not increasing it)
and that would still be valued at a fraction of $1T.
As a software engineer I’d be paying thousands if there were no alternatives. As a household - just about everyone pays $100 a month for internet access alone and something like cloude can be easily worth that.
Thing is - regular people have no clue what to do with it since they are locked in ecosystems of apple and google.