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You (1) are a company who (2) understands the business domain and has an appropriate business plan. Sadly the reality of funding today makes it unlikely that these two will both be simultaneously satisfied. The problem is that history will look back on the necessary business plan and deem it a failure even if it generates a company that does a billion dollars plus in annual revenue. This is actually not unique to large language models but most innovation around computers. The basic problem is that if you build a force-multiplier (spreadsheets, personal computing, large-language models all come to mind) then what will make it succeed is its versatility: people want a hammer that can be used for smashing all manner of things, not just your company's particular brand of matching nails. And most people will only pick up that hammer once per week or once per month, only like 1% of the economy if that will be totally revolutionized, "we use this force-multiplier every day, it is now indispensable, we can't imagine life without it," and it's never predictable what that sector will be -- it's going to be like "oh, who ever dreamed that the killer application for LLMs would be them replacing AutoCAD at mechanical contractors" or some shit. In those strange eons, to wildly succeed, one must give up on anticipating all usages of the software, one must cease controlling it and set it free. "Well where's the profit in that?" -- it is that this company was one of the first players in the overall market, they got an early chance to stake out as much territory as possible. But the market exploded way larger than they could handle and then everybody looks back on them and says "wow, what a failure, they only captured 1% of that market, they could have been so much more successful." Yeah, they captured 1% of a $100B market, some failure, right? But what actually happens is that companies see the potential, investors get dollar signs in their eyes, everyone starts to lock down and control these, "you may use large language models but only in the ways that we say, through the interfaces which we provide," and then the only thing that you can use it for is to get generic conversational advice about your hemorrhoids, so after 5-10 years the bubble of excitement fizzles out. Nobody ever dreams to apply it to AutoCAD or whatever, and the world remains unchanged. |
OpenAI has spent a lot of money to get their result. It's safe to assume it will take a lot of money to get a similar result, and then to share it (although I assume bit torrent will be good enough). Once people are running their models, they can innovate to their hearts content. It's not clear how or why they'd give money back to the enabling technology. So how does money flow back to the innovators in proportion to the value produced, if not a SaaS?