Even in the world where all models are basically equivalent (a thesis I don’t buy, but will grant you for arguments sake) - I believe there is much more to the AI business than just training and running models.

It’s a very new set of technologies, and understanding what is useful to customers and what isn’t is the whole game. Call it, product taste. There were a million cell phones before the iPhone took over the world. Why iPhone? Product taste. There are a million startups, and only a select few become unicorns. Why? Product taste.

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khurs 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>There were a million cell phones before the iPhone took over the world.

You have tripped yourself up there.

iPhone took over as it introduced something innovative over standard phones, but then Open Source (Android) matched the multi-touch and software differences and Apple's branding, lock-in and design etc have managed to keep it as a big player in wealthier countries. IPhone also came on the back of the massive iPod success.

ChatGPT launched the same innovation vs Google Search, but just like Android Opensource AI is moving fast now.

Android has 72.7% market share at present, Open Source AI will do the same unless the frontier labs can continue to do something new.

The frontier labs are saddled with enormous investor and other debts. How long they can keep innovating by spending so much on R&D and paying there staff very high wages remains to be seen.

Once investors cash out via an IPO, the companies are back down to earth and playing in the real world again.

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gallerdude 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money! I find it really funny when people attribute Apple’s success to “oh, the only reason they succeed is design and marketing.” Yeah, I mean factually speaking design and marketing actually do matter a lot!

Us developer types like to pretend like specs are the only thing that matters? If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time. Product experience is simply everything, as much as we like to pretend like nitty technical decisions are the most important thing.

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afavour 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Android has market share, but Apple makes all of the money!

So? The benefit of open source is that you don’t have to worry about making a ton of money. You just need to be viable.

Apple: premium product a minority is willing to pay for

Android: standard product the majority use

I’m sure there will continue to be iPhone equivalents in the AI world, premium bespoke models. But the vast majority of people will be happy with a cheaper offering.

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gallerdude 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The original comment was “open models are what kill OpenAI and Anthropic”, which to me is as silly as saying “Android is what killed Apple”

	▲	afavour an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well I think a critical difference is that, unlike Apple, OpenAI and Anthropic have taken on so much VC funding that a 20-something % market share is not going to be enough for them. So open models could kill them, not because of the techonology but because of the way they're financed.

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pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you could have a 10x more powerful model you could only access running locally through your terminal, versus a weaker model through a clean web interface, normies will pick the web ui every single time.

More like if you could have a 1.25x more powerful model that you could only access through some weird surveillance megacorps aggressive monetization scheme, or choose from 100 others running open models and accessible through 100 different interfaces pandering to every taste.

Normies will choose the megacorp every time, because that was the one in the tv commercial, and within six months will have left for one of the others in a rage.

The only corporate hope is that the government steps in to ban their competition.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There were many smartphones before both iOS and Android.

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Cyberdog an hour ago | parent [-]

While that may be technically true for a strict definition of “smartphone,” there’s no denying the iPhone redefined the concept in a way that its competitors were forced to copy to have any hope of keeping up. Nobody hears the word “smartphone” and thinks of a Blueberry or Treo anymore.

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inigyou 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

What exactly did the iPhone do better?

	▲	Cyberdog 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a subjective question, so I'll give a subjective answer. The browser, for better or worse, was a lot less dumbed down for mobile than competitors, the stylus-less touch interface reduced UI friction and the odds that you'd lose a critical (if inexpensive) component, and the slew of contemporary iPod users could easily migrate their libraries over.