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How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catchin

by lukan 6mo ago

How can there be a "winner takes it all" situation with AI? OpenAI lead the game while they were best. Antrophic followed and got better. Now openAI is catching up again and also google with gemini(?) ... and the open weight models are 2 years behind. Any win here seems only temporary. Even if a new breakthrough to a strong AI happen somehow.

teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
Not even 2 years behind.
conradkay 6mo ago
Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top. So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.
- svnt 6mo ago
  What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind? It’s a commodity in the making.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    That's certainly how it looks right now but where's the guarantee? What happens if it turns out that deep learning on its own can't achieve AGI but someone figures out a proprietary algorithm that can? That sort of thing. Metaphorically we're a bunch of tribesmen speculating about the future potential outcomes of the space race (ie the impacts, limits, and timeline of ASI).
    - zarzavat 6mo ago
      Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models. I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        If you assume the status quo - a powerful not quite human level AI - then you are most likely correct. However one of the primary winner takes all hypotheticals (and to be sure it remains nothing more than a wild hypothetical at this point) is achieving and managing to control proprietary ASI. Approximately, constructing something that vaguely resembles a god. Being unfathomably smarter than the people making use of it you could simply instruct it not to reveal information that would enable a potential competitor to construct an equivalent. No need to worry about competition; you can quite literally take over the world at that point. Not that I think it's likely such a system will so easily come to pass, nor that I think humanity could manage to maintain control over such a system for long. But we're talking about investments to hedge against existential tail risks here so "within the realm of plausibility" is sufficient.
      - dragonwriter 6mo ago
        > What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields. Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.
        6mo ago
  - conradkay 6mo ago
    They're months behind now and have very low market share, so as long as they stay months behind the duopoly/triopoly can hold.
  - lebuin 6mo ago
    The argument is based on one of these companies hitting the singularity, making it impossible for any other company to catch up ever. I still think it's way more likely we'll see a typical S-curve where innovation starts to plateau. But even a small chance of it happening in the future is worth a lot of money today.
    - jona-f 6mo ago
      There's a massive thinking gap in this singularity thinking. We ARE the singularity. It has been exponential all the way back to the big bang. First the stars, the solar system, life, consciousness, language, computers, the internet. Yes it is speeding up and that is exciting, cause we are going to experience a lot in our lifetimes. We have a lot of exponential growth to go before progress becomes instant. There are physical limits, too. Power generation for example. I can't believe on what dumb shit people bet the world economy on.
    - svnt 6mo ago
      How does it follow that companies that are months apart will trip the singularity and this will prevent the others from doing so? Who supplies the hardware for the singularity?
ngruhn 6mo ago
I guess if you build the first AI that can autonomously self improve, then nobody can catch up anymore.
- lukan 6mo ago
  But if the second AI that can self improve comes up? Then it all remains a question of who has the most compute power, as self improve seems compute heavy with the current approach.
- hattmall 6mo ago
  That seems really paradoxical and I think it would just burn up compute. The AI really doesn't have any way to know it's getting better without humans telling. As soon as the AI begins to recursively improve based on its own definition of improvement model collapse seems unavoidable.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    If humans are able to judge, and if the AI is more capable than a human in every respect, then why can't the AI be the judge of its own performance? Humans judge their own output all the time.
    - darkwater 6mo ago
      The difference IMO is that every single human is a slightly different model, not the same one with a different prompt, or weights.
      - fc417fc802 6mo ago
        I'm not sure I buy that competition between individuals is a hard requirement but lets assume that to be the case for now. Then how many variants of itself do you suppose an AI could instantiate in parallel given full control of a gigawatt class datacenter?
    - TeMPOraL 6mo ago
nine_k 6mo ago
Look at the "winner takes all" situation in web search. Of course other search engines exist, but the scale of the Google search operation allows it to do things that are uneconomical for smaller players.
calebkaiser 6mo ago
2 years? 2 years ago, gpt-4o was OpenAI's flagship model. The gap is real, but much smaller than 2 years.
jedberg 6mo ago
The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.
- devmor 6mo ago
  Are these investors high? Or just insane?
  - saintfire 6mo ago
    Its just market euphoria.
  - fc417fc802 6mo ago
    Neither. It's the most severe FOMO in history. The best case scenario is equivalent to attempting to pick future winners just prior to the industrial revolution really kicking off. Except this time around the technological timelines appear to be severely compressed and everyone is fully aware of what's at stake. And again, that's the best case scenario.
  - blippage 6mo ago
    Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, and others, have made many useful insights as to how AI as an investment is likely to pay out. One technique is, instead of trying to pick individual winners, look at the total addressable market. Then compare the market size with the capital being pumped in. If you look on this basis, Aswath concluded that collectively AI investment is likely to provide unsatisfactory returns. Here's a recent headline: "Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks $1 trillion won’t be enough to meet AI demand—and he’s paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary to prove it" There are two parts to this. 1. A staggering $1t is expected to be invested in AI. Someone worked out that this was more than the entire capital expenditure for companies like Apple. We're talking about its entire existence here. IOW, $1t is a lot of dough. A LOT. Secondly, this whole notion that AI is such a sure thing that half the salary will be in tokens should ring alarm bells. '“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”' I recall from the dotcom fiasco that service companies like accountants and lawyers were providing services to the dotcom companies and being compensated in stock options rather than cold hard cash like you'd normally expect. Very dangerous. As another poster pointed out, this really boils down to FOMO by big tech. I'm expecting big trouble down the line. We await to see if I'm early or just plain wrong.
etruong42 6mo ago
The first one to reach AGI is the winner-takes-all. AGI or something similar will result in exponential progress to super-intelligence since AGI can just improve itself.

by lukan 6mo ago

teaearlgraycold 6mo ago

Not even 2 years behind.

conradkay 6mo ago

Recursive self-improvement is one argument. Otherwise winner takes all seems much less likely than a OpenAI/Anthropic duopoly. For the best models, obviously other providers will have plenty of uses, but even looking at the revenue right now it's pretty concentrated at the top. So if I'm Google I'd want a decent chunk of at least one of them.

svnt 6mo ago
What is the argument for a duopoly when Kimi and Deepseek models are only months behind? It’s a commodity in the making.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  That's certainly how it looks right now but where's the guarantee? What happens if it turns out that deep learning on its own can't achieve AGI but someone figures out a proprietary algorithm that can? That sort of thing. Metaphorically we're a bunch of tribesmen speculating about the future potential outcomes of the space race (ie the impacts, limits, and timeline of ASI).
  - zarzavat 6mo ago
    Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models. I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      If you assume the status quo - a powerful not quite human level AI - then you are most likely correct. However one of the primary winner takes all hypotheticals (and to be sure it remains nothing more than a wild hypothetical at this point) is achieving and managing to control proprietary ASI. Approximately, constructing something that vaguely resembles a god. Being unfathomably smarter than the people making use of it you could simply instruct it not to reveal information that would enable a potential competitor to construct an equivalent. No need to worry about competition; you can quite literally take over the world at that point. Not that I think it's likely such a system will so easily come to pass, nor that I think humanity could manage to maintain control over such a system for long. But we're talking about investments to hedge against existential tail risks here so "within the realm of plausibility" is sufficient.
    - dragonwriter 6mo ago
      > What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you start with the fields where the lowest investment outside of your unmatchable AI provides the highest returns and, and plow the growing proceeds into investing in successive fields. Obviously, it is even more awesome if you are a gigantic company with enormous cash to to throw around to start with when you develop the AI in question, since that lets you get the expanding domination operation going much quicker.
      - 6mo ago
- conradkay 6mo ago
  They're months behind now and have very low market share, so as long as they stay months behind the duopoly/triopoly can hold.
- lebuin 6mo ago
  The argument is based on one of these companies hitting the singularity, making it impossible for any other company to catch up ever. I still think it's way more likely we'll see a typical S-curve where innovation starts to plateau. But even a small chance of it happening in the future is worth a lot of money today.
  - jona-f 6mo ago
    There's a massive thinking gap in this singularity thinking. We ARE the singularity. It has been exponential all the way back to the big bang. First the stars, the solar system, life, consciousness, language, computers, the internet. Yes it is speeding up and that is exciting, cause we are going to experience a lot in our lifetimes. We have a lot of exponential growth to go before progress becomes instant. There are physical limits, too. Power generation for example. I can't believe on what dumb shit people bet the world economy on.
  - svnt 6mo ago
    How does it follow that companies that are months apart will trip the singularity and this will prevent the others from doing so? Who supplies the hardware for the singularity?

ngruhn 6mo ago

I guess if you build the first AI that can autonomously self improve, then nobody can catch up anymore.

lukan 6mo ago
But if the second AI that can self improve comes up? Then it all remains a question of who has the most compute power, as self improve seems compute heavy with the current approach.
hattmall 6mo ago
That seems really paradoxical and I think it would just burn up compute. The AI really doesn't have any way to know it's getting better without humans telling. As soon as the AI begins to recursively improve based on its own definition of improvement model collapse seems unavoidable.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  If humans are able to judge, and if the AI is more capable than a human in every respect, then why can't the AI be the judge of its own performance? Humans judge their own output all the time.
  - darkwater 6mo ago
    The difference IMO is that every single human is a slightly different model, not the same one with a different prompt, or weights.
    - fc417fc802 6mo ago
      I'm not sure I buy that competition between individuals is a hard requirement but lets assume that to be the case for now. Then how many variants of itself do you suppose an AI could instantiate in parallel given full control of a gigawatt class datacenter?
  - TeMPOraL 6mo ago

nine_k 6mo ago

Look at the "winner takes all" situation in web search. Of course other search engines exist, but the scale of the Google search operation allows it to do things that are uneconomical for smaller players.

calebkaiser 6mo ago

2 years? 2 years ago, gpt-4o was OpenAI's flagship model. The gap is real, but much smaller than 2 years.

jedberg 6mo ago

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

devmor 6mo ago
Are these investors high? Or just insane?
- saintfire 6mo ago
  Its just market euphoria.
- fc417fc802 6mo ago
  Neither. It's the most severe FOMO in history. The best case scenario is equivalent to attempting to pick future winners just prior to the industrial revolution really kicking off. Except this time around the technological timelines appear to be severely compressed and everyone is fully aware of what's at stake. And again, that's the best case scenario.
- blippage 6mo ago
  Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, and others, have made many useful insights as to how AI as an investment is likely to pay out. One technique is, instead of trying to pick individual winners, look at the total addressable market. Then compare the market size with the capital being pumped in. If you look on this basis, Aswath concluded that collectively AI investment is likely to provide unsatisfactory returns. Here's a recent headline: "Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks $1 trillion won’t be enough to meet AI demand—and he’s paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary to prove it" There are two parts to this. 1. A staggering $1t is expected to be invested in AI. Someone worked out that this was more than the entire capital expenditure for companies like Apple. We're talking about its entire existence here. IOW, $1t is a lot of dough. A LOT. Secondly, this whole notion that AI is such a sure thing that half the salary will be in tokens should ring alarm bells. '“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”' I recall from the dotcom fiasco that service companies like accountants and lawyers were providing services to the dotcom companies and being compensated in stock options rather than cold hard cash like you'd normally expect. Very dangerous. As another poster pointed out, this really boils down to FOMO by big tech. I'm expecting big trouble down the line. We await to see if I'm early or just plain wrong.

etruong42 6mo ago

The first one to reach AGI is the winner-takes-all. AGI or something similar will result in exponential progress to super-intelligence since AGI can just improve itself.