Yes it is a newer business but doesn’t change the fact that models are trending towards a commodity. And that’s a huge problem for the business model on offer.

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827a 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think the models being a commodity matters much. Consider: Email providers are a commodity. Cloud linux server hosting is a commodity. Checking accounts are a commodity. There's a lot of great businesses, trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities. DeepSeek v7 Pro might open source and be better than any Claude model (unlikely), but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode. They just aren't. The models really matter far, far less than the experience these companies build around the model, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are doing a decent job of making that experience reasonably sticky and compelling.

	▲	atomicnumber3 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities" Which ones? I'm looking at the list of companies with > $1T market cap and none of them have commoditized markets. Instead, they all have huge network effects (Apple), enormous legacy lockin (Broadcom), a religious monarchy (...), or are some of the only people on the planet who can do what they do (nvidia, tsmc). Mind you, there's lots of _billion_ dollar businesses in commoditized or partially commoditized markets. But Anthropic as a billion dollar business is sunk.
	▲	SkiFire13 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode And they likely won't be spending them on something without ZDR like Fable 5.
	▲	nozzlegear 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> DeepSeek v7 Pro might open source and be better than any Claude model (unlikely), but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode. But they might spend them on American inference providers running DeepSeek v7 Pro with ZDR routed through OpenRouter. Or hell, they might just run it themselves like we're already seeing some enterprises do right now.

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Lalabadie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Right – they can't argue for acceleration factored in their own value, if it's a property of the whole surrounding market.

IMO, US AI providers are not leaders in efficiency anyway, they're still running the original ~2010 playbook that led to LLMs ("What if we took ML researchers' work, but funded it at 50M/yr instead of 250k/yr?").

They're currently arguing for the continuation of that approach: Scale funding first, and the rest will follow. It is high-risk and WeWork-like, by nature.

	▲	gtirloni 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's high-risk in that it's proven to not work anymore. Scale isn't a differentiator or won't be in the short term. Meanwhile, everyone else is working on making these models more useful through a ton of ecosystem around them. I don't see how the frontier labs will have any control over that to deliver on what investors expect. As mentioned in another post here, if they could, they would already be spawning hundreds of companies to diversify their reach but they aren't, because this era of AI is awesome but still doesn't allow a few individuals to replace millions of others that easily (or efficiently).