alt Hacker NewsThere is no path from the current set of cloud-focused AI hyperscalers to the kind of fully automated luxury gay space communism you seem to be gesturing at. The economics don't work out. OpenAI, Google, and/or Anthropic are supposed to invent magic superintelligence that makes all human labor obsolete or uncompetitive and... just host it for free? Like, that's not how the game is played. Them producing and hosting all the models makes them an economic chokepoint, and the only way you get the capital to train and host models at this scale is if you have a story to sell to investors that ends with "and then we become an economic chokepoint and extract rents from everyone else".
This is all embedded in their future growth prospects. Nobody is interested in subsidizing AI as a public service forever. They're interested in "AI is going to make this company go 100x".
The only way you get the capital to train and host models at this scale is if you have a story to sell to investors that ends with "and then we become an economic chokepoint and extract rents from everyone else".
I agree that this dream of huge returns is luring investors.
I don't think that it will actually work that way. The barriers to making a useful model appear to be modest and keep getting lower. There are a lot of tasks where some AI is useful, but you don't need the very best model if there's a "good enough" solution available at lower prices.
I believe that the irrational exuberance of AI investors is effectively subsidizing technological R&D in this area before AI company valuations drop to realistic levels. Even if OpenAI ends up being analogous to Yahoo! (a currently non-sexy company that was once a darling of investors), their former researchers and engineers can circulate whatever they learned on the job to the organizations that they join later.