Comment by rbehrends
1 day ago
The major counterpoint here is commoditization; you may have the market growing and models becoming cheaper at the same time. And we don't even have to look to Chinese models for that, as OpenAI has been adjusting its pricing already. For profitability, Anthropic still seems to be pretty dependent on its current price levels.
That said, I'm also somewhat skeptical that there is even much room for growth left unless somebody finds a new, important, and token-hungry use case.
I believe that the value that OpenAI and Anthropic hold, in light of stiff competition from China, is not their products but their internal models. China’s work is all derivative of American model API access. The exponential RSI loop means that as long as Anthropic and OpenAI keep steady footing and only release older models they will will always be the best on the market and all others will be in their tailwinds. These two things combined are what make me believe OpenAI and Anthropic will hold value and grow as companies.
Weren't DeepSeek the first to release chain of thought/reasoning models? [1]
They are also (like other models we know about) experimenting with the architecture. [2]
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948
[2] https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2026/kimi-k3-architecture-...
They were not. That was OpenAI with o1
Even if we were to accept your entire argument [1], none of it contradicts the commoditization argument. Note also that competitition does not come just from China, but also from Google, Meta, and SpaceXAI. Where they currently are is not relevant, the entire LLM landscape will likely look nothing like today by the end of 2027.
[1] I don't, I think China is primarily limited by compute and will be at least for the next couple of years, probably longer.
Best on the market, for something not being sold on the market? How is that helpful in terms of actual revenue?
If Anthropic manages to start producing new pharmaceuticals with their internal models or something that thesis could make sense but not if 90% of their revenue comes from enterprise API sales which would necessarily have to be accessible to the public. Which are then inevitably fast followed by Chinese models 3 months later.
You can be the best in a $100B market, but that won't make you worth $2T.
Generating a full length movie script and then the video?
In theory, yes. But the reality is that deep learning models just aren't good at creative output (to put it mildly). And neither Anthropic nor OpenAI have any models that generate video, so this wouldn't help them; in fact, OpenAI killed off Sora.