As I was reading the start of your argument, I thought you were gonna call the models a depreciating asset! Totally agree about GPUs too, but literally everything they’re spending money on has to be rebuilt to stay competitive. They have to go for the moonshot of training a full new model when better tech comes, they have to upgrade GPUs to keep their data centers efficient.

Technically, the model is a depreciating asset too. Just consider the difference between a model you need a B200 cluster to run vs one you can run on a Raspberry Pi. One's going to have a moat around it that gives it value and the other isn't. It's a hyperbolic argument to be sure but the nature of "enthusiast" hardware is that we're currently running, say, ~27B parameter models on hardware for a few thousand. What's that going to look like in 2 years?

Anthropic/OpenAI really need to train ever-bigger models to keep their moat. But that assumes there isn't a law of diminishing returns and also that a compressed model isn't sufficient for what many people need.

You mihgt say that the training is a barrier. And it is, kind of. Notice how it's Chinese companies coming out with open-source models like DeepSeek and Qwen? That's no accident. As soon as DeepSeek came out I knew what was going on: China is going to make sure no single Western company "owns" AI. It's in their national interest for that not to happen.

I wouldn't be surprised if the rush-to-IPO is motivated, at least in part, by getting ahead of Chinese AI commoditization.