[simplyluke]

Maybe I misspoke by saying open source.

The larger point I'm making is I think models are rapidly becoming commoditized. There is probably a small market long term that's willing to pay 10x for 10% marginal gains, but the majority of the buyers in the market will be economic and we're likely to have a lot of folks willing to spend 1/10 the cost for 90% of the performance, and plenty of companies that haven't raised hundreds of billions-trillions who can provide that.

A lot of the frontier labs valuations has been based on an assumption that 1-2 companies would get break-away intelligence that basically made them economic chokepoints indefinitely into the future. The reality that's becoming increasingly clear is that model quality is a pretty linear function of (cash burned - ability to copy other's homework) and the economics are starting to look a lot more like airlines than online advertising.

[grttq]

Lets go one step further.

The economics of airlines are such that they generally earn a return on capital less than cost of capital.

I think this is exactly where we are heading and OAI-Anthropic are the concordes.

[extraextra]

Not OP, but it is a known fact that the cumulative profits of the airlines industry (in US) over it's history has been basically 0. We can say that essentially airlines are in business to support other businesses. I believe this is what OP might've been referring to.