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> nothing about the industry's finances add up right now Nothing about the industry’s finances, or about Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances? I look at the list o

> nothing about the industry's finances add up right now Nothing about the industry’s finances, or about Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances? I look at the list of providers on OpenRouter for open models, and I don’t believe all of them are losing money. FWIW Anthropic claims (iirc) that they don’t lose money on inference. So I don’t think the industry or the model of selling inference is what’s in trouble there. I am much more skeptical of Anthropic and OpenAI’s business model of spending gigantic sums on generating proprietary models. Latest Claude and GPT are very very good, but not better enough than the competition to justify the cash spend. It feels unlikely that anyone is gonna “winner takes all” the market at this point. I don’t see how Anthropic or OpenAI’s business model survive as independent entities, or how current owners don’t take a gigantic haircut, other than by Sam Altman managing to do something insane like reverse acquiring Oracle. EDIT: also feels like Musk has shown how shallow the moat is. With enough cash and access to exceptional engineers, you can magic a frontier model out of the ether, however much of a douche you are.

HNisCIS 9mo ago
It's become rather clear from the local LLM communities catching up that there is no moat. Everyone is still just barely figuring out how this nifty data structures produce such a powerful emergent behavior, there isn't any truly secret sauce yet.
- petesergeant 9mo ago
  I’d argue there’s a _bit_ of secret sauce here, but the question is if there’s enough to justify valuations of the prop-AI firms, and that seems unlikely.
- riku_iki 9mo ago
  > local LLM communities catching up that there is no moat. they use Chinese open LLMs, but Chinese companies have moat: training datasets and some non-opensource tech, and also salaried talents, which one would need serious investment for if decide to bootstrap competitive frontier model today.

HNisCIS 9mo ago

It's become rather clear from the local LLM communities catching up that there is no moat. Everyone is still just barely figuring out how this nifty data structures produce such a powerful emergent behavior, there isn't any truly secret sauce yet.

petesergeant 9mo ago
I’d argue there’s a _bit_ of secret sauce here, but the question is if there’s enough to justify valuations of the prop-AI firms, and that seems unlikely.
riku_iki 9mo ago
> local LLM communities catching up that there is no moat. they use Chinese open LLMs, but Chinese companies have moat: training datasets and some non-opensource tech, and also salaried talents, which one would need serious investment for if decide to bootstrap competitive frontier model today.