alt Hacker NewsThe forklift market seems to be in the $90-$95 billion / year while the global passenger car market is $2.9 trillion.
This is the problem.
While the frontier labs will always have a market for AI that can do things the other models can't, if the sliver of work that can be done only by the frontier models is narrow enough, then what they spend to train those frontier models may not let them capture all that much extra revenue.
I absolutely think there will be a market for frontier models pushing further and further.
But it's not yet a given whether or not being ahead on capabilities is going to buy them all that much more higher earnings relative to lower tier providers.
If it stays the case that going from local AI to a frontier model makes the difference between 60% and 99%, then they probably will, but there's nothing to suggest local or open model, or second-tier closed models won't keep moving ahead as well, and eat away at the use cases where only a frontier model will do.
Do you think that human civilization has a finite demand for intelligence? That there is a point that we can hit, and stop there, and say "we've thought of all there is to think about, no more thinking is required?"
Do you think that we are anywhere near that point?
We've already seeing things - like what's happening with AI reverse engineering now. I'm a reverse engineer - and I know that the reason why RE was used as "last resort option" was that expert reverse engineers are rare, expensive, and work slow.
But now that a lot of RE workloads can be tackled by AI instead of a human? The demand for reverse engineering is at a never before seen high. AI made reverse engineering much more viable - and thus, a lot more reverse engineering is happening now.
There are myriads of fields like this - things that go overlooked not because no one wants them, but because the economics of human expertise make them nonviable in most cases. As AI gets better, it can begin to enter those fields.
Except you, of course, need to push the frontier to do it.