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More than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just
by cedws 6mo ago
More than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just to stay competitive on the market. These companies can also choose to give exclusive access to hand picked individuals and cut everyone else off and there would be nothing to stop them.
This is already happening to some degree, GPT 5.3 Codex's security capabilities were given exclusively to those who were approved for a "Trusted Access" programme.
- aspenmartin 6mo agoWell don’t forget we still have competition. Were anthropic to rent seek OpenAI would undercut them. Were OpenAI and anthropic to collude that would be illegal. For anthropic to capture the entire coding agent market and THEN rent seek, these days it’s never been easier to raise $1B and start a competing lab
- cedws 6mo agoIn practice this doesn't work though, the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is an example, two competing forces doesn't create aggressive enough competition to benefit the consumer. The only hope we have is the Chinese models, but it will always be too expensive to run the full models for yourself.
- sghiassy 6mo agoChinese competition can always be banned. Example: Chinese electric car competition
- sho_hn 6mo agoThat's what OP was saying, I think, noting that running them locally won't be a solution.
- oblio 6mo agoAlso Chinese smartphones. Huawei was about 12-18 months from becoming the biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world a few years ago. If it would have been allowed to sell its phones freely in the US I'm fairly sure Apple would have been closer to Nokia than to current day Apple.
- aurareturn 6mo agoIf Huawei was never banned from using TSMC, they'd likely have a real Nvidia competitor and may have surpassed Apple in mobile chip designs. They actually beat Apple A series to become the first phone to use the TSMC N7 node.
- realusername 6mo agoI don't think it will matter too much in the long run, 8 of the top 10 smartphone manufacturers are Chinese, there's nothing the US government can really do.
- dmantis 6mo agoJust in one particular country. That hurts their labs, but there are ~190 other countries in the world for Chinese to sell their products to, just like they do with their cars. And businesses from these other countries would happily switch to Chinese. From security perspective both Chinese and US espionage is equally bad, so why care if it all comes down to money and performance.
- brokencode 6mo agoNew companies can enter this space. Google’s competing, though behind. Maybe Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, or Apple will come out with top notch models at some point. There is no real barrier to a customer of Anthropic adopting a competing model in the future. All it takes is a big tech company deciding it’s worth it to train one. On the other hand, Visa/Mastercard have a lot of lock-in due to consumers only wanting to get a card that’s accepted everywhere, and merchants not bothering to support a new type of card that no consumer has. There’s a major chicken and egg problem to overcome there.
- lelanthran 6mo ago> In practice this doesn't work though, the Mastercard-Visa duopoly is an example, MC/Visa duopoly is an example of lock-in via network effects. Not sure that that applies to a product that isn't affected by how many other people are running it.
- TypesWillSaveUs 6mo agoDescribing providing a highly valuable service for money as `rent seeking` is pretty wild.
- 1attice 6mo agoMy housing is pretty valuable. I pay rent. Which timeline are you in?
- kaashif 6mo agoRent seeking refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
- 1attice 6mo agoYes I know that, read your sibling post
- bonsai_spool 6mo agoActually you're saying similar things: Rent-seeking of old was a ground rent, monies paid for the land without considering the building that was on it. Residential rents today often have implied warrants because of modern law, so your landlord is essentially selling you a service at a particular location.
- 1attice 6mo agothanks!
- mhluongo 6mo agoTwo different "rent"s.
- 1attice 6mo agoNot really see your sibling post
- MattRix 6mo agoThe thing is that the current models can ALREADY replicate most software-based products and services on the market. The open source models are not far behind. At a certain point I'm not sure it matters if the frontier models can do faster and better. I see how they're useful for really complex and cutting edge use cases, but that's not what most people are using them for.
- therealdeal2020 6mo agobut you are assuming that the magical wizards are the only ones who can create powerful AIs... mind you these people have been born just few decades ago. Their knowledge will be transferred and it will only take a few more decades until anyone can train powerful AIs ... you can only sit on tech for so long before everyone knows how to do it
- cedws 6mo agoIt's not a matter of knowledge, it's a matter of resources. It takes billions of dollars of hardware to train a SOTA LLM and it's increasing all the time. You cannot possibly hope to compete as an independent or small startup.
- block_dagger 6mo agoPresumably, the hardware to run this level of model will be democratized within the timeframe of the parent comment.
- walterbell 6mo agoSee https://amppublic.com https://amppublic.com and Stanford CS153, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZqh7emiz9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZqh7emiz9Q
- selcuka 6mo ago> It takes billions of dollars of hardware to train a SOTA LLM and it's increasing all the time. True, but it's also true that the returns from throwing money to the problem are diminishing. Unless one of those big players invents a new, propriatery paradigm, the gap between a SOTA model and an open model that runs on consumer hardware will narrow in the next 5 years.
- wincy 6mo agoEventually these super expensive SXM data center GPUs will cost pennies on the dollar, and we’ll be able to snatch up H200s for our homelabs. Give it a decade. Also eventually these WEIGHTS will leak. You can’t have the world’s most valuable data that can just be copied to a hard drive stay in the bottle forever, even if it’s worth a billion dollars. Somehow, some way, that genie’s going to get out, be it by some spiteful employee with nothing to lose, some state actor, or just a fuck up of epic proportions.
- robwwilliams 6mo agoWith Gemma-4 open and running on laptops and phones I see the flip side. How many non-HN users or researchers even need Opus 4.6e level performance? OpenAI, Anthropric and Google may be “rent seeking” from large corporations — like the Oracles and IBMs.
- baq 6mo agoEveryone, once AI diffuses enough. You’ll be unhireable if you don’t use AI in a year or two.
- eru 6mo agoYou know, they have competitors?
- alwillis 6mo ago> More than killer AI I'm afraid of Anthropic/OpenAI going into full rent-seeking mode so that everyone working in tech is forced to fork out loads of money just to stay competitive on the market. You should be more concerned about killer AI than rent seeking by OpenAI and Anthropic. AI evolving to the point of losing control is what scientists and researchers have predicted for years; they didn’t think it would happen this quickly but here we are. This market is hyper competitive; the models from China and other labs are just a level or two below the frontier labs.