I can see why Anthropic is freaking out right now. China has undermined their whole business. AI models will be basic commodities where hosting providers earn a tiny margin over the raw costs rather than the predicted fortunes from being the gatekeepers to the technology.

Their business model always seemed to be "become IBM, gods of the mainframe and server-side-computing" and that always seemed a bit unlikely to last forever considering how thoroughly the PC disrupted that by being "good enough" without the lock-in.

IMO because they speed-ran it so much (raising orders of magnitudes more, pushing out new stuff orders of magnitudes faster) it will also lead to the rest of the world catching up faster and shrinking the pool of people internal to them who continually benefit compared to what actually went on with IBM. There's only so much upside when you join a company with hundreds-of-billions valuation.

I guess the other part of their business plan bet was "become literal god of AGI". Maybe it'll still happen!

the writing should have been on the wall when meta did it with llama. it was very apparent that one or two entities could release a "good enough" product into the wild commoditizing the frontier of yesterday.

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