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 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

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

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aurareturn 2 days 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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adgjlsfhk1 2 days ago | parent [-]

even ignoring distillation, so long as hardware or ml get better over time, training a new model from scratch is cheaper the later you do it

	▲	aurareturn 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If hardware gets better over time, they also get better for OpenAI.
	▲	ef3dfd 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yep the poster is assuming efficiencies will not come. Absolutely they will. And this is a huge problem for OAI - given Google is targeting vertical integration, they will acquire a cost-advantage. As long as the model performance is good enough, they will kick OAI and Anthropic out in the long-run. The valuations of OAI and Anthropic are nonsense. A true valuation would incorporate failure risk, which is natural for startups/fast growing and money losing firms. Anyone who takes them serious is incredibly delusional.

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dionidium 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.

These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.

	▲	aurareturn 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Uber is a taxi company hoping for a monopoly in the US. OpenAI is a software company hoping for a monopoly in many counties.