[an0malous]

> If open source models are ~3-6 months behind SOTA, and ~opus4.6 capabilities are good-enough for product market fit, do the frontier labs have half a decade to catch up on their prior burn?

They know they do not and that’s why they’re all trying to IPO right now, so they can pass the bag to consumer investors

[WinstonSmith84]

More correlation, if more correlation was needed:

1- SpaceX + Tesla + xAI merger / IPO while Musk was vocal against IPO for about a decade

2- Warren Buffett cash at record highs

Someone got to be exit liquidity

[londons_explore]

The printing press was good enough for product market fit back in the 1700's. But now it isn't.

Last year's AI models will be the same. Do you want to spend 3 hours prompting free AI to fix your code or 1 hour prompting AI you paid $20 for?

[an0malous]

That's only if these AI companies can keep improving their model performance faster than open source options can keep up. I don't think performance will keep scaling with more training data, and even if it does they've likely already used the entire history of content created by humans for training. Everything points towards diminishing returns in an increasingly crowded space of competitors, there's no other reason for these companies to be rushing to an IPO if they felt secure in their market positioning.