alt Hacker NewsI just look at technology over the last 50 years and see: decreasing prices, increasing capabilities. Barring temporary hiccups. Altman & co did a very smart thing by locking up the GPUs and the RAM, they effectively created a temporary near monopoly. At the same time: that incentivized the rest of the world to look more closely at efficiency negating some of the gains of that expense.
It's just like a utility with the slight difference that it can be sold at a distance without significant cost for transportation, in many ways it is the ultimate digital good. Unlike Spotify copyright is not an issue, unlike your electricity, gas, internet or water company there is no last mile problem. Unlike Google there are a ton of qualified contenders already (Google had to be better than Altavista, which wasn't hard, but they were so much better they managed to lock up search for long enough to cement their position).
Anthropic has none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
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> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
Isn’t that what it takes though? Doesn’t startup culture celebrate this attitude?
> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
I think this might genuinely going to become a problem for them in the long run. People just absolutely hate their guts. That's a very strong motivator to do everything possible to get rid of them.
We'll of course see in 5-10 years if the doom PR will work out, but that always was a rather high-risk gamble, and it already looks like it might not.
There is a significant amount of businesses and people that are very willing to switch to literally anyone else just out of spite alone.
This is a great analysis
The only thing protecting America's AI industry is the cartel of hardware and embargoes against sharing resources. Once those are cracked, they have zero moat. We're talking 1's and 0's at the end of the day, not nuclear engineering or nuclear fusion or some other revolutionary way to increase the value of real property.
> On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
Not all of them. Only those who outspend all the others and then you never really hear of any others. It's like the most basic requirement for the job.