We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.

Well, one big difference now is that you need to billions to become the next big player. The barriers to entry are incredibly high, if you plan on competing against the big players.

Of course, there could be some future lab or startup which completely revolutionizes the field by going for some approach that doesn't require a boatload of money to train a model, but for now, we're stuck with the LLMs and the costs they come with..

Anthropic looks a lot more like early Google -- not the first mover, but "lightning in a bottle" culture, talent, focus, and product direction that causes them to become a dominant, enduring figure.

OpenAI looks a lot more like early Yahoo -- earlier, quite a spectacle at first, definitely a game-changer and disruptor, but overspent, less focused, and subject to slow collapse under its own fragmentation and lack of overwhelming clarity of mission and purpose.

All that said, history rhymes but does not repeat, and trying to map present-day companies onto previous generations is an exercise in futility. The future is fundamentally unique.

OpenAI will be the Yahoo of AI. Starting off as a household name, but fades to irrelevancy as competitors take over.

Google is much better positioned long term with their TPUs and separate enormous revenue from advertising.

But do I leave all my money in US index funds?

So we get ad flooded useless AIs?

That's a funny thing to say as time is infinite, and we're at the early stages of every single thing. Reasoning in time dynamics is useful though to be clear