[allenleee]

With all due respect, AI is ultimately a capital game. World models aren’t where real B2B customer revenue comes from—at least compared to today’s LLMs; they’re mainly a better story for raising huge amounts of private capital. Hopefully they figure out how to build the next-gen AI architecture along the way.

[echelon]

The most useful models are image, video, and audio models. It makes sense that we'd make the video models more 4D aware.

Text really hogged all the attention. Media is where AI is really going to shine.

Some of the most profitable models right now are in music, image, and video generation. A lot of people are having a blast doing things they could legitimately never do before, and real working professionals are able to use the tools to get 1000x more done - perhaps providing a path to independence from bigger studios, and certainly more autonomy for those not born into nepotism.

As long as companies don't over-raise like OpenAI, there should be a smooth gradient from next gen media tools to revolutionary future stuff like immersive VR worlds that you can bend like the Matrix or Holodeck.

And I'll just be exceedingly chuffed if we get open source and highly capable world models from the Chinese that keep us within spitting distance of the unicorns.

[danielmarkbruce]

>> The most useful models are image, video, and audio models

This is wrong. The vast majority of revenue is being generated by text models because they are so useful.

[echelon]

> they are so useful.

Enterprise doesn't know how to use these models to achieve business outcomes.

These subscriptions will unwind, and when they do, it'll be a bloodbath.

[danielmarkbruce]

I work in an enterprise using LLMs all over the place, well. Our spending is only going to go one way, up.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

>Some of the most profitable models right now are in music, image, and video generation.

I don’t think many of the companies running these make a profit right now

[lelanthran]

> Some of the most profitable models right now are in music, image, and video generation.

Which companies are using these.models to run at a profit?

[echelon]

MidJourney, ElevenLabs, Suno, Kling

[lelanthran]

> MidJourney, ElevenLabs, Suno, Kling

Maybe I need to re-read reports; last I checked, none of those companies were operating at a profit.

[Aperocky]

That just sounds like text with extra steps.

Fundamentally what AGI is trying to do is to encode ability to logic and reason. Tokens, images, video and audio are all just information of different entropy density that is the output of that logic reasoning process or emulation of logic reasoning process.

[ryandv]

> Fundamentally what AGI is trying to do is to encode ability to logic and reason.

No? The Wason selection task has shown that logic and reason are not really core nor essential to human cognition.

It's really verging on speculation, but see chapter 2 of Jaynes 1976 - in particular the section on spatialization and the features of consciousness.

[MangoToupe]

> World models aren’t where real B2B customer revenue comes from

You could say the same thing about AGI. Ultimately capital will realize intelligence is a drawback.

[imvetri]

By capital game, do you mean money investment game or market ruler's game?

[allenleee]

I mean both, and in AI today, they’re deeply intertwined. The “capital game” isn’t just about money—it’s about access to compute, talent, and time. Whoever has the resources can experiment, iterate, and potentially uncover the next big architecture. That financial power naturally translates into influence—control over the market, narrative, and ecosystem. In practice, the investment game and the market ruler’s game often become the same thing.

[imvetri]

Where does it lead to?

[ThrowawayTestr]

AI might be the biggest transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in history. Billions have been poured into closed sourced models which have led directly and indirectly to open weight models being available to everyone.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

Open weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people.

[beeflet]

They do everything the closed weight models do, slightly less effectively, but for way cheaper. I'd buy that for a dollar!

Just because people aren't spending money on them doesn't mean it won't eat your lunch.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

The closed weight models aren’t worth very much money to most people, who find a 20 dollar subscription a bit pricey.

[beeflet]

It's not just the cost, but the freedom to do what you want... With open weight models I can run them on my own hardware on the edge, work with data I am not cool with uploading, experiment with different interfaces, use them for things the original trainers did not intend, even retrain the model a bit.

I am developing a p2p program where the model runs on the end user's computer. So I don't even need to pay money for each user and have a bunch of infrastructure monetize them. It is a game changer and allows for a completely different architecture.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

That’s awesome, but I think we’re kinda talking past each other. I was responding to the claim that these models represent the largest wealth transfer from rich to poor in history. In order for that to be true, these models, closed or open, need to have value for average people. I don’t see that at all. Most use it as a glorified google, some are actively harmed by the sycophantic tendencies of the models.

Edit: I’d like to add that I personally get a lot of value out of the models. They’ve helped me learn to do frontend development very quickly at my job. That said, that hasn’t translated into higher pay. The expectations have risen with employee capacity.

[breppp]

At the cost of buying the poor's thoughts (training data)

[yannyu]

Pretty similar to social media in a lot of ways. They've strip mined the commons and provided us a corporate controlled walled garden to compensate us for our loss.

[beeflet]

they were always free. The notion of intellectual property is lofty in the first place