[solatic]

> Stocks going down didn't un-research drugs

Drugs cost pennies to manufacture after they are researched and make their way through the approval pipeline. There are many generic drug manufacturers who can work off the existing formulas.

The more apt comparison is that LLMs won't be un-trained. Opus 4.8 now exists. Even if Anthropic somehow went bankrupt, that particular asset could, at the very least, be sold for proverbial pennies on the dollar to a "generic" inference provider.

[saalweachter]

Research does get lost over time. The whole point of the patent system is keeping that from happening; if the drug company goes bankrupt, even if they lose all their internal documentation in the process, hopefully the patents and other public paperwork provides enough information for an unrelated company -- either having acquired the patent rights, or after the patent period ends -- to reconstruct the processes with less investment then the original research.

If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

[alfiedotwtf]

> If a bankrupt AI company maintains enough of a skeleton crew to consolidate and archive its intellectual property it could be sold off to another company, but there are also timelines where it all ends up digital dust in the wind.

Only if that skeleton crew had deep deep pockets. If Anthropic closed their doors tomorrow because the market collectively saw that AI was not profitable and so open sourced everything, there wouldn't be any money to train Opus 5.0... it would then have to fall on governments to put money into the hat (which I can't see happening unless it was Europe)

[eecc]

Or locked away in litigation for decades… See what became of the Amiga