alt Hacker NewsI think we agree?
What moat? You answered yourself: "capital intensive"
But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years.
They've bought up all the RAM and GPUs, which pushes the capital requirements upward for everyone else. But, they can't corner the market forever, there are too many competing interests. AMD and Intel keep making new GPUs and APUs. The memory makers can't just sell to only AI companies forever, if they do Chinese manufacturers will move in and eventually eat them from below (as has happened many times before).
They have a moat today, and it's just that it's really expensive to train and host frontier models, especially at commercial scale. It used to be there was also some secret sauce to making it fast and efficient. But, secret sauce is being published daily by all sorts of researchers, folks are figuring out how to do more with less and it often finds its way into llama.cpp or vLLM or SGLang within days or weeks.
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> I think we agree?
That is such a crazy way to start a response to someone trying to argue with you. I should try this. That's amazing. I know you didn't mean it as a trick, at least I'm pretty sure you meant it sincerely, but I'm just struck by the power of it to defuse and redirect the conversation. And this was a very low-grade example, but I could imagine this being useful in much more heated contexts.
They’ve bought up all the RAM and GPUs…
Is there an endgame where even this is considered overly complex? Instead of starving the competition by buying up all the compute, why not just buy up… all the money!? Hoover up as much investment capital as possible so that your competitors can’t get funding.
The other half of the moat is the data they stole from everyone else, some of it illegally. So, be sure they will do everything in their power to stop others from getting that data freely.
>But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years.
That was Moore's law saying that. And it seems Moore's law slowed down quite a bit for now.
"But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years."
hmm nooo ??, physic says otherwise
> But, history says the supercomputer of today will fit in your pocket in a few years.
I don't think this will be true in the same time span anymore. Each miniaturization is costing more and more money.
Perhaps they'll come up with exotic fundamental improvements, but I don't think the rate of improvement of compute/watt will match the previous decades.