[conradkay]

Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top.

So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.

[svnt]

What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind?

It’s a commodity in the making.

[lebuin]

The argument is based on one of these companies hitting the singularity, making it impossible for any other company to catch up ever. I still think it's way more likely we'll see a typical S-curve where innovation starts to plateau. But even a small chance of it happening in the future is worth a lot of money today.

[svnt]

How does it follow that companies that are months apart will trip the singularity and this will prevent the others from doing so?

Who supplies the hardware for the singularity?

[jona-f]

There's a massive thinking gap in this singularity thinking. We ARE the singularity. It has been exponential all the way back to the big bang. First the stars, the solar system, life, consciousness, language, computers, the internet. Yes it is speeding up and that is exciting, cause we are going to experience a lot in our lifetimes. We have a lot of exponential growth to go before progress becomes instant. There are physical limits, too. Power generation for example. I can't believe on what dumb shit people bet the world economy on.

[fc417fc802]

That's certainly how it looks right now but where's the guarantee? What happens if it turns out that deep learning on its own can't achieve AGI but someone figures out a proprietary algorithm that can? That sort of thing. Metaphorically we're a bunch of tribesmen speculating about the future potential outcomes of the space race (ie the impacts, limits, and timeline of ASI).

[zarzavat]

Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?

If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models.

I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.

[dragonwriter]

> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?

Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields.

Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.

[renticulous]

To dominate the real world, you need correcting feedback loop from reality. These feedback loops and regulations (in medical and other industries) take long time to come back with good signals. So you are still time bound by how fast your experiments are.

[TeMPOraL]

Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness.

That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, as the models (and harnesses) get better, the number of fields SOTA model owners could dominate overnight, continues to grow.

(One possible trigger would be the open models. As long as the gap between SOTA and open is constant or decreasing, there will be a point where SOTA operators might be forced to cannibalize the software industry by a third party with an open model and access to infra pulling the trigger first.)

[fc417fc802]

Don't open models and competition between frontier providers both serve as barriers here? If a frontier provider pivoted as you describe it would certainly change the landscape but they wouldn't be unassailable without developing some sort of secret sauce that gave them an extremely large advantage over everyone else. They'd need a sufficient advantage to pull out far ahead of everyone else before others had a chance to react in a meaningful way. Otherwise the competitors that absorbed all your subscriptions would stack that much more hardware and continue to challenge you.

I think meaningful change to the current equilibrium would require at absolute minimum the proprietary equivalent of the development of the transformer architecture.

[zarzavat]

It's not clear to me that one horse-sized AI allows you to outcompete 100 duck-sized AIs in use by everyone else once you factor in the non-intelligence contributions that the others with weaker AIs bring to the table.

There's a lot more to building a successful product than how smart your engineers/agents are, how many engineers/agents you have, and capital.

Google, for example, can be extremely dysfunctional at launching new products despite unimaginably vast resources. They often lack intangible elements to success, such as empathizing with your customers' needs.

If we were in a world where AI was not already widespread, then I would agree that having strong AI would be an immense competitive advantage. However, in a world where "good enough" AI is increasingly widespread, the competitive advantage of strong AI diminishes as time goes on.

[TeMPOraL]

> Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you?

At this point, if you can no longer safely drip-feed industry the access to "thinking as a service" and rake in rent, you start using it, displacing existing players in segment after segment until you kill the entire software industry.

That's pre-ASI and entirely distinct from the AI itself becoming so good it takes over.

[fc417fc802]

If you assume the status quo - a powerful not quite human level AI - then you are most likely correct. However one of the primary winner takes all hypotheticals (and to be sure it remains nothing more than a wild hypothetical at this point) is achieving and managing to control proprietary ASI. Approximately, constructing something that vaguely resembles a god.

Being unfathomably smarter than the people making use of it you could simply instruct it not to reveal information that would enable a potential competitor to construct an equivalent. No need to worry about competition; you can quite literally take over the world at that point.

Not that I think it's likely such a system will so easily come to pass, nor that I think humanity could manage to maintain control over such a system for long. But we're talking about investments to hedge against existential tail risks here so "within the realm of plausibility" is sufficient.

[conradkay]

They're months behind now and have very low market share, so as long as they stay months behind the duopoly/triopoly can hold.