alt Hacker News> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?
Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields.
Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.
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To dominate the real world, you need correcting feedback loop from reality. These feedback loops and regulations (in medical and other industries) take long time to come back with good signals. So you are still time bound by how fast your experiments are.
Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness.
That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, as the models (and harnesses) get better, the number of fields SOTA model owners could dominate overnight, continues to grow.
(One possible trigger would be the open models. As long as the gap between SOTA and open is constant or decreasing, there will be a point where SOTA operators might be forced to cannibalize the software industry by a third party with an open model and access to infra pulling the trigger first.)
It's not clear to me that one horse-sized AI allows you to outcompete 100 duck-sized AIs in use by everyone else once you factor in the non-intelligence contributions that the others with weaker AIs bring to the table.
There's a lot more to building a successful product than how smart your engineers/agents are, how many engineers/agents you have, and capital.
Google, for example, can be extremely dysfunctional at launching new products despite unimaginably vast resources. They often lack intangible elements to success, such as empathizing with your customers' needs.
If we were in a world where AI was not already widespread, then I would agree that having strong AI would be an immense competitive advantage. However, in a world where "good enough" AI is increasingly widespread, the competitive advantage of strong AI diminishes as time goes on.