[quantum_state]

Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.

[mediaman]

How? They are all losing tens of billions of dollars on this, so far.

Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

There doesn't appear to be any moat.

This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but the AI business looks terrible, and it appears that most benefits are going to accrue fairly broadly across the economy, not to a few tech titans.

NVIDIA is the one exception to that, since there is a big moat on their business, but not clear how long that will last either.

[TheColorYellow]

I'm not so sure thats correct. The Labs seem to offer the best overall products in addition to the best models. And requirements for models are only going to get more complex and stringent going forward. So yes, open source will be able to keep up from a pure performance standpoint, but you can imagine a future state where only licensed models are able to be used in commercial settings and licensing will require compliance against limiting subversive use or similar (e.g. sexualization of minors, doesn't let you make a bomb etc.).

When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).

There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.

[gizmodo59]

Nvda is not the only exception. Private big names are losing money but there are so many public companies seeing the time of their life. Power, materials, dram, storage to name a few. The demand is truly high.

What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.

[yowlingcat]

I agree with your point and it is to that point I disagree with GP. These open weight models which have ultimately been constructed from so many thousands of years of humanity are also now freely available to all of humanity. To me that is the real marvel and a true gift.

[ulfw]

It's turning out to be a commodity product. Commodity products are a race to the bottom on price. That's how this AI bubble will burst. The investments can't possibly show the ROIs envisioned.

As an LLM I use whatever is free/cheapest. Why pay for ChatGPT if Copilot comes with my office subscription? It does the same thing. If not I use Deepseek or Qwen and get very similar results.

Yes if you're a developer on Claude Code et al I get a point. But that's few people. The mass market is just using chat LLMs and those are nothing but a commodity. It's like jumping from Siri to Alexa to whatever the Google thing is called. There are differences but they're too small to be meaningful for the average user

[charcircuit]

>losing tens of billions

They are investing 10s of billions.

[jredwards]

I'd like to see evidence that open models are closing that gap. That would be promising.

[gruez]

>Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.

What happens when the AI bubble is over and developers of open models doesn't want to incinerate money anymore? Foundation models aren't like curl or openssl. You can't have maintain it with a few engineer's free time.

[fHr]

The other side of the market:

[derektank]

Isn’t the reason we have a public domain so that people aren’t in a perpetual debt to their intellectual forebears?

[gruez]

Copyrights last a very long time. Moreover nothing says it has to be open. The recipe to coke is still secret.

[adolph]

> reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years

Do we not all stand on the shoulders of giants? Will "big next" not take up where "big tech" leaves off one day?

[simianwords]

Why do you see it as zero sum? I don’t care if big tech is accumulating intellectual wealth. I’m getting good products.

[justarandomname]

yeah, but zero chance of that happening unfortunately.

[pear01]

well practiced cynicism is boring.

imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.

hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.

[relaxing]

What should?

[mrwaffle]

Is this technically a form of retroactive mind rape? If so, at least we have the right oligarchic friends experienced in this running the big show. (Apologies if I just any broke rules here).

[mrwaffle]

This seems to be a touchy subject for YC people with 500+ karma. Not a repudiation but an 'invisible hand' downvote to avoid a response or exposure of an opinion. My ancestors fought in the revolutionary war and like them, I'll die on this very subtle rolling hill of a question. I loved you all as brothers, this may be the end for mrwaffle.

[FridayoLeary]

Sounds like you just want some of their money.

[triceratops]

Yes, especially since they're talking about wiping about most or all white-collar jobs in our lifetimes. What's wrong with that?

[blactuary]

If they want to abandon noblesse oblige we can certainly go back to the old way of evening things out. Their choice

[mackeye]

some would say their money is our money via the ltv :-)