alt Hacker NewsIn this game, who wins - in the long term - is who has the best model: so far OpenAI is ahead, so in the long term this is what matters. However, for the same reason, if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon. The game they play only make sense if their SOTA models do things that other models can't do at a comparable level.
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> if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon
> Why would a business pay for Slack when IRC exists?
> Why would a business pay for Dropbox when FTP exists?
IMO bad take.
You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant.
I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.
You might have a subpar product (for the price) but the reputation and history is what makes people open their wallets.
this is like saying the car with the better engine wins, but all we're doing is commuting to work
I have the same impression. Strange to see this being downvoted & it was after reading the comment that I read the username to find out its antirez!
Now, I think that with these companies IPO'ing and Nasdaq and other bending themseleves and their rules to cater to them (as in case of SpaceX), these companies are very close to an IPO.
So for the employees, they are probably gonna get good evaluations, atleast in the short term and perhaps they are having a problem which is worth having.
But as you have suggested, I feel like the whole thing might be flaky especially given open source models. I believe that OSS models are at worst close to literal SOTA ~6 months ago.
So OpenAI & Anthropic have to somehow always be on the edge to get better models to not lose this (imo) very small time grip that they have, all while losing billions of dollars and having to worry about profitability & so many other concerns in it of itself.
I don't think that there is any other thing inside CS or any industry where two pieces of software being almost comparable enough with not much moat around except a diff of 6 months best, is something on which trillions of dollars float around on. We don't know how things will pan out but if I have to guess, It might not be looking good for OAI, Anthropic over especially the longer horizon.
OpenAI and Anthropic have the know-how for building much larger models that will be a lot smarter and run on datacenter-scale compute. This is a natural 'moat' that will be inherently hard to replicate for on-prem compute or small neoclouds running open-weight/local AI. They can easily coexist with a robust local AI scene.