alt Hacker NewsYes it is a newer business but doesn’t change the fact that models are trending towards a commodity. And that’s a huge problem for the business model on offer.
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Lalabadie • today at 2:48 PM
Right – they can't argue for acceleration factored in their own value, if it's a property of the whole surrounding market.
IMO, US AI providers are not leaders in efficiency anyway, they're still running the original ~2010 playbook that led to LLMs ("What if we took ML researchers' work, but funded it at 50M/yr instead of 250k/yr?").
They're currently arguing for the continuation of that approach: Scale funding first, and the rest will follow. It is high-risk and WeWork-like, by nature.
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I don't think the models being a commodity matters much. Consider: Email providers are a commodity. Cloud linux server hosting is a commodity. Checking accounts are a commodity. There's a lot of great businesses, trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities. DeepSeek v7 Pro might open source and be better than any Claude model (unlikely), but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode. They just aren't. The models really matter far, far less than the experience these companies build around the model, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are doing a decent job of making that experience reasonably sticky and compelling.