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I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
by christina97 2mo ago
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- paxys 2mo agoDifferent companies have different motivations. I'm sure some are genuine, but a lot of them simply lost the race (to OpenAI/Anthropic/Google) and know they can't compete anymore, so are shifting strategies. How many times has Microsoft done exactly this in the past?
- cyanydeez 2mo agolooking at both openai and anthropic; they are winning something, but a sober look at their finances will make you silently mouth "but what did they win".
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- infamouscow 2mo agoThey want to be the successor to Enron.
- manincharge 2mo agoNext year's archeologists will dig out their fossilized remnants.
- cyanydeez 2mo agopretty optimistic to think there'll befunded expeditions.
- fidotron 2mo agoIf there are effectively only two AI companies allowed to train or run model inference then demand for hosting, GPUs and data centers goes down, so they'd be able to squeeze their suppliers that much more too.
- ErneX 2mo agoThey are worried about OpenAI and Anthropic making their own processors and controlling the whole stack is my guess.
- swiftcoder 2mo agoThey really don't need to be very worried about that. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al have decades of experience in shipping custom hardware at scale, and it is not a simple field to pivot into
- ErneX 2mo agoTrue, but Google has their own models and did not sign this either. The other thing that comes to mind is they want to avoid the government from banning open models as has been suggested by some of the closed models providers.
- petcat 2mo agoNvidia is subject to export restrictions on GPUs to China. So Chinese labs have responded by allowing American hosts to run their open-weight models in the US, where there are no restrictions. We see this in the EU too where Scaleway, and now Hetzner are getting into the inference host space serving Chinese open-weight models. So Nvidia benefits from more inference providers running many Chinese models that they otherwise would not have been able to service.
- bee_rider 2mo agoOh, that’s interesting. I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. If it has incentivized them to release open weight models instead, that seems like an unexpected win.
- brendoelfrendo 2mo agoIt's all things at once. Perhaps it's incentivized the open weight strategy. It's also prompted Huawei to ramp up production of AI chips to try and create a local competitor to Nvidia. It's also also created a grey market for Nvidia chips within China.
- mathgeek 2mo ago> I think the general expectation was that blocking exports to China would result in companies there building their own cards competing with NVIDIA. In the long run, perhaps, but it's a lot faster to scale up the capacity and usage of existing hardware/datacenters/grid, and even add new capacity to those, than it is to develop brand new GPU hardware and the fabrication of it.
- jononor 2mo agoThe cards are also coming... Some of the very first are already out - but it will take a couple of years before they hit their stride in full. And cards will likely be primarily for Chinese companies initially, and then go for exports later. So it will go under the radar for many western techies for a while. Seeing what China has managed with PCB production, low to mid-end semiconductors, phone manufacturing and electric I would hesitate to bet against them. Nvidia is now lobbying to remove the export ban, to try to reduce the incentives for developing their own high-end LLM training/serving (and cash in on current demand).
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bmurphy1976 2mo agoNVIDIA sells the tools. The more the better it is for them. Microsoft and Meta are also-rans at this point. Their best hope of catching up is probably leveraging their infra and open models.
- Jagerbizzle 2mo ago"leveraging their infra" is a pretty solid play, considering the scope of investments these two companies have made thus far.
- jackb4040 2mo agoIt does however totally abandon the question of making a profitable mass-market AI product upon which the scale of those investments was based.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoNot entirely, if models become commodity, then Microsoft's play as an infrastructure & enterprise apps company is the better bet. They don't need to make profitable mass-market AI models, they just need the best tooling on top of any model their customers pick, remaining fully model agnostic. "AI Product" doesn't necessarily mean "We sell API access to a our models." Ton of companies out there itching to buy a commercial off the shelf product to deliver whatever AI capabilities they need packaged in a nice GUI, with enterprise governance controls, without needing a dev team/team of engineers to integrate it or develop harnesses, etc. Buy it->have IT click a few buttons in an admin console->Deploy and have it be immediately useful is the play.
- jackb4040 2mo agoAI services becoming a commodity by definition means that the price will hover around cost to operate. That's just what commoditization means in tech. Free, as in Google creating a free browser for no profit in order to increase the size of their ad market. The entire justification for the AI buildout, and the valuations of all the major AI labs, is that the service will be priced at some significant fraction of the knowledge work it's replacing. If you think it will become commoditized in the future, you are saying these companies are significantly overvalued at present.
- somenameforme 2mo agoThe future will probably have most of all companies running local models, simply because the alternative would be essentially every company that uses LLMs ending up becoming completely dependent upon Anthropic et al. And that dependence would be milked to the point of absurdity once solidly established. And as a more general point - more major competitors in a domain is very good for everybody except those competitors themselves, who would rather there be as few as possible.
- bogdanoff_2 2mo agoIs that different from how companies are reliant on cloud computing?
- moralestapia 2mo agoYes. No law prevents you from provisioning and using your own hardware.
- TheBicPen 2mo agoThere absolutely are laws restricting what hardware you are allowed to use. e.g. https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-regarding-routers-produced-foreign-countries https://www.fcc.gov/faqs-recent-updates-fcc-covered-list-reg...
- mlazos 2mo agoYeah I fully expect companies with lots of GPUs but not a good model like Microsoft and Amazon to just take these open weight models and make money, the GPU expense is the only moat at this point. It’s classic commoditize your complement, nobody can replicate the cloud providers, everyone can replicate the models with open weights.
- thewebguyd 2mo agoProbably a real effort to push for some kind of sanctions or commerce block on Chinese models. Anthropic just doubled their political spending to $40 mil for the midterms to push for "AI Safety."
- mcintyre1994 2mo agoI suspect that whatever Musk has agreed to spend on the midterms in exchange for those sweetheart deals the SpaceX IPO got will make that look absolutely comical, but we’ll see.
- zugi 2mo agoI don't see why convincing people to overpay for something based on hype and artificial scarcity required any "sweetheart deals" via congress.
- Aissen 2mo agoThey've seen the government officials parroting OpenAI and Anthropic lobbies talking points, and they have smart enough people to see the signs of upcoming regulatory capture. If I were cynical, I'd say it isn't helped by the current US administration.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2mo agoProbably the fact that they don't want Anthropic or Google or OpenAI to have access to their data theoretically, and that they do want to use good AI, and that they don't want to spend the money themselves to make a good model...
- midnightbobarun 2mo agoNvidia benefits no matter what because their hardware is being used. Microsoft and Meta benefit by making sure that the gap between "Anthropic/OpenAI" and "everyone else" doesn't widen, or they'll be hopelessly dependent on those frontier labs.
- 1-6 2mo agoI'm not certain about this statement because Huawei created their own chip.
- cogman10 2mo agoAlmost certainly these companies are using similar strategies as the Chinese models which they fear will be made illegal. It's also the case that it makes it hard to attract customers if your openweight model is banned. A major reason the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and Deepseek are popular (well, at least highly talked about) is because of the open weight models they gave away.
- aforty 2mo agoI think Meta would love nothing more than to throw a very large wrench into the works of OpenAI/Anthropic. Open models could mean one or both go bankrupt which is good for them. Nvidia sells the hardware. Microsoft sells the hosting.
- phyzix5761 2mo agoThey're trying to bring down Anthropic. There's been a huge smear campaign happening all year.