Give me a billion and I'll have 500M of revenue in no time by selling dollars at 50 cents.

Why are we treating OpenAI and Anthropic differently than say, Amazon or Uber? Both companies invested in growth for many years before making a profit. Most tech companies in the last 2-3 decades lost money for years before making a profit.

Why are we saying that OpenAI and Anthropic can't do the same?

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hirako2000 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Two reasons. They somewhat broke even, and kept getting investment. The potential for quasi monopoly was obvious.

Openai can't claim either.

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aurareturn 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.

Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon.

OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have the revenue to keep competing. You can already see this with a few labs looking for a niche instead of competing head on with Anthropic and OpenAI.

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vlovich123 7 hours ago | parent [-]

The cost of copying SOTA models though is super cheap and doesn’t take super long.

	▲	aurareturn 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How do you distill when OpenAI and Anthropic inevitably move to tasks running in the cloud? IE. Go buy this extremely hard to get concert ticket for me. Distilling might only be effective in the chat bot dominant era. We are about to move to an agents era. Furthermore, I’m guessing distilling will get harder and harder. Claude Code leak shows some primitive anti distilling methods already. There’s research showing that models know when it’s being benchmarked. Who’s to say Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t able to detect when their models are being distilled?

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outside1234 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Worse, Google can afford to outspend them in this game and basically run them both out of money.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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pier25 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not even remotely comparable. Uber burnt some $30B over a decade or so.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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Forgeties79 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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