alt Hacker NewsBenedict Evans may be right after all; frontier models look more and more like telecom companies in the 90s. Billions and billions of investment in infrastructure while others further up the stack captured all the value.
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In spite of their deeper pockets, massive datacenters, colosal amounts of user data, and hundreds of thousands of top developers, even Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are well behind.
I think Evans is completely wrong. There are only 2 truly frontier models. (at least for now). And Anthropic seems to be leaving OpenAI behind so there might be only 1 in the near future. (which is scary/dangerous)
It is much better. Imagine if the whole Manhattan project could have been outsourced and costs you nothing. I expect in a short time that open source models will be almost or almost parity by 2030 and running on consumer devices.
Last I checked the telcos made plenty of money in the 90s. Should Verizon be getting a cut of my Claude Pro subscription, since I use FIOS to access it?
There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.