This is just opinion, could be wrong, discussion is encouraged.
I think the way Anthropic and OpenAI are going, needing to rely ever more on hype and rushing towards IPO before the general populace understands the rouse that’s being played, I can see how they will play out in the years to come. Not mentioning the heat from China.
I thought until recently they would eventually die because the economic reality would simply catch up to them, but thinking of how Apple TV+ works to produce above average television shows at a massive loss to Apple, I think that this perhaps the only viable route ahead. These big giants might just buy up some of these LLM farms, once their real value becomes apparent in the market (before or after IPO) and be incorporated as a proprietary technology for that company. Apple could buy Anthropic for a few billion to provide agentic coding and significantly lower the barrier of entry to new programmers to develop apps for their platforms. The entire business idea by itself is a losing business, but integrated horizontally across their other business arms it could make some sense.
Similar things could happen between other players. What’s very clear is that LLM as a core technology has plateaued and to gain 1% more accuracy or performance at this point is beginning to require an order of magnitude increase in raw compute.
Curious what others think on how this road for these chatbot corps looks 2-3 years down the track.
I would love to watch them utterly fail, so putting on my Cassandra hat we know that’s off the table. They’re not going to make a guy like Altman a trillionaire because he’s not an actively insane drug addled pedophile and that seems to be the main qualification so far. Something like what you say feels possible, but too tidy and optimistic.
I could see a scenario where ailing AI stocks threaten the overall economy with massive financial overextension, get bought by the government or by someone using taxpayer money somehow, and turn all those data centres into partisan slopaganda and surveillance factories.
he’s not an actively insane drug addled pedophile
Negatives are very hard to prove.
Many of his public statements and claims are objectively insane. Drugs are definitely a possibility. Who knows about the pedophilia… As you say, it does seem to go hand in hand with billionaires and having so much money that laws are more like suggestions.
For sure. I have heard there are allegations about him and his sister, and he’s the only person I’ve ever seen who somehow manages to look profoundly horrified in every single photo they’re in, which lends some weight to the mental illness hypothesis. I was only speaking to the moment I find myself in, perceptually.
