[antirez]

In this game, who wins - in the long term - is who has the best model: so far OpenAI is ahead, so in the long term this is what matters. However, for the same reason, if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon. The game they play only make sense if their SOTA models do things that other models can't do at a comparable level.

[zozbot234]

OpenAI and Anthropic have the know-how for building much larger models that will be a lot smarter and run on datacenter-scale compute. This is a natural 'moat' that will be inherently hard to replicate for on-prem compute or small neoclouds running open-weight/local AI. They can easily coexist with a robust local AI scene.

[micromacrofoot]

this is like saying the car with the better engine wins, but all we're doing is commuting to work

[antirez]

Comparisons like that give the impression of reasoning about things, but it's a weak tool to understand reality of very different things.

[micromacrofoot]

not really "best" at one thing doesn't mean you win the market for it, rarely does in fact

[Imustaskforhelp]

I have the same impression. Strange to see this being downvoted & it was after reading the comment that I read the username to find out its antirez!

Now, I think that with these companies IPO'ing and Nasdaq and other bending themseleves and their rules to cater to them (as in case of SpaceX), these companies are very close to an IPO.

So for the employees, they are probably gonna get good evaluations, atleast in the short term and perhaps they are having a problem which is worth having.

But as you have suggested, I feel like the whole thing might be flaky especially given open source models. I believe that OSS models are at worst close to literal SOTA ~6 months ago.

So OpenAI & Anthropic have to somehow always be on the edge to get better models to not lose this (imo) very small time grip that they have, all while losing billions of dollars and having to worry about profitability & so many other concerns in it of itself.

I don't think that there is any other thing inside CS or any industry where two pieces of software being almost comparable enough with not much moat around except a diff of 6 months best, is something on which trillions of dollars float around on. We don't know how things will pan out but if I have to guess, It might not be looking good for OAI, Anthropic over especially the longer horizon.

[tornikeo]

IMO bad take.

You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant.

I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.

You might have a subpar product (for the price) but the reputation and history is what makes people open their wallets.

[Capricorn2481]

> You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant

It's going to be debated forever whether wiring your own open source tech has a lower development cost than the equivalent AWS bill. For me, that's too broad a statement, as I have seen it go both ways. What is true: There is only some knowledge overlap between maintaining an AWS stack and having your own Prometheus logged, ceph backed set of boxes.

That is not the case with LLMs. At least, not right now. They roughly work the same and are easy to pick up. They are about as straightforward of an interface as it gets, and using them in "advanced" ways could be summarized on an index card. They are relatively fungible.

I don't see a world where OpenAI runs on brand recognition alone. It needs to be more convenient to run than local LLMs. They've done that by buying so much of the worlds hardware that it becomes more expensive to run these things locally.

[lelanthran]

> I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.

Depends. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the pop.

Only a few unicorns from the dot-com bust came out the other side (Amazon, Google, ... anyone else?), and that was a piddling affair compared to this one.

[kgwgk]

Yahoo is still around and kicking. Even Lycos' corpse is still warm.

[forest32]

> if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon

> Why would a business pay for Slack when IRC exists?

> Why would a business pay for Dropbox when FTP exists?

[antirez]

AI is not a product per se, it is a technology you can decline into a product, and the product has a lot less value than the technology itself. Who has the best LLM can copy any product idea and make it a lot better. Similarly if open weight LLMs are everywhere and powerful, open source products in the space of agents are too simple to replicate for people to pay big money to a few companies: not everything is alike, not every parallel makes sense. The pi agent is good as a replacement for Codex and Claude Code if you wire frontier models to it. And when products are complex and matter a lot, like complicated AI-powered design suites for instance, there is no reason why OpenAI / Anthropic will win this space instead of a random startup. So either a few companies retain frontier AI, or those companies will die.

About IRC / Slack: other than the fact IRC was abandoned, Slack is about control, not product. The product is terrible.

FTP / Dropbox: this comparison does not make sense.