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.
A thing that gets overlooked often is that being the first in a field is often quite bad for business. Apple learned that lesson. They didn't make the first smartphone, tablet, or mp3 player. They waited for other people to be first and then iterated well on that.
The people who financed laying the train tracks that became the economic arteries of North America (along with robbing more land and pushing out the people who already lived there) didn't become rich. The second generation that ran logistics and passengers was way more likely to become rich. They didn't have to pay for the infrastructure but they benefited from it being there.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the son of the South African emerald miners, Google, etc. They're just laying tracks right now. The conglomerates that don't rely only on so-called AI have a chance to survive. All the other ones are going to run out of money and/or get bought and taken over. The real winner of the industry probably hasn't even made it to the starting line.
Training models takes a big investment and then becomes difficult to protect against people who will just try to copy and steal it. In a way, I think world history will look at the US as the first generation track layers. You built the data centers at ridiculous cost, both in hardware and negative consequences for people and the environment, and then get out-iterated by all the people who didn't want to jump on to the hype train three years ago or couldn't foot the bill at the time. The cost decreases the longer you wait. US companies think they are investing into future long-tern licensing agreements to use their yet unknown products. I think that's dumb and isn't going to happen.
I think Apple will benefit from their lean back and wait approach. They will look at where this stuff consolidates into something useful and then just buy it.
Edit: Forgot this point: most of the train tracks have become redundant in the age of airplanes. The infrastructure is decaying. Data centers may become overgrown train tracks faster than we expect.
Very fine points on being the smart follower, yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :) Even in the US cargo would come to a standstill without rail.
I think Apple in particular has a high chance of coming out on top once the dust settles. They can’t lose in a fight they didn’t partake in, and they happen to be building the perfect hardware for small scale models.
That's because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no "wilderness to conquer." That's what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that's because it's already there. They wouldn't build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn't exactly in good shape.
You’d be surprised. AAR Freight Rail Facts & Figures, ATA Economics and Industry Data, BTS US Ton-Miles of Freight
Long story short: you’d need millions of extra trucks and truck drivers to replace all the long haul, rip out rail in pretty much any industrial nation comes to a grinding halt, which is why it’s often at the top of the list of military targets during wars.
Sorry, you accidentally ran into a train person :)
I don't dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That's unnecessary. I already think that.
Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don't think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn't thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that's a counterfactual statement, it's only an opinion.