alt Hacker NewsBut OpenAI and Ant can be in more than just the commodity part of the business. They can both make frontier models and sticky products on top of those that have network or other effects that make competition tough.
But OpenAI and Ant can be in more than just the commodity part of the business. They can both make frontier models and sticky products on top of those that have network or other effects that make competition tough.
The question isn't whether the market is big enough. It's whether at a race to the bottom on prices is sustainable and worth what investors expected it to be. The original story of OpenAI and Anthropic was that it was a race to super intelligence and whoever gets there first basically captures all the money in the economy. That kind of investment pitch means missing out not just on big returns but perhaps infinite return on investment. It seemed like it'd be true when the market was young and the cost to compete was prohibitive, but now anyone can compete with open weight models that are cheaper and maybe not the best, but are good enough.
You raise $200B to be a high margin low capex business, not an industrial commodity producer with high capex and margins being set by competitors who can duplicate your product and undercut you on price.