[gallerdude]

I always grew up hearing “competition is good for the consumer.” But I never really internalized how good fierce battles for market share are. The amount of competition in a space is directly proportional to how good the results are for consumers.

[gordonhart]

Remember when GPT-2 was “too dangerous to release” in 2019? That could have still been the state in 2026 if they didn’t YOLO it and ship ChatGPT to kick off this whole race.

[WarmWash]

I was just thinking earlier today how in an alternate universe, probably not too far removed from our own, Google has a monopoly on transformers and we are all stuck with a single GPT-3.5 level model, and Google has a GPT-4o model behind the scenes that it is terrified to release (but using heavily internally).

[minimaxir]

They didn't YOLO ChatGPT. There were more than a few iterations of GPT-3 over a few years which were actually overmoderated, then they released a research preview named ChatGPT (that was barely functional compared to modern standards) that got traction outside the tech community because it was free, and so the pivot ensued.

[nikcub]

I also remember when the playstation 2 required an export control license because it's 1GFLOP of compute was considered dangerous

that was also brilliant marketing

[gildenFish]

In 2019 the technology was new and there was no 'counter' at that time. The average persons was not thinking about the presence and prevalence of ai in the way we do now.

It was kinda like a having muskets against indigenous tribes in the 14-1500s vs a machine gun against a modern city today. The machine gun is objectively better but has not kept up pace with the increase in defensive capability of a modern city with a modern police force.

[jefftk]

That's rewriting history. What they said at the time:

> Nearly a year ago we wrote in the OpenAI Charter : “we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research,” and we see this current work as potentially representing the early beginnings of such concerns, which we expect may grow over time. This decision, as well as our discussion of it, is an experiment: while we are not sure that it is the right decision today, we believe that the AI community will eventually need to tackle the issue of publication norms in a thoughtful way in certain research areas. -- https://openai.com/index/better-language-models/

Then over the next few months they released increasingly large models, with the full model public in November 2019 https://openai.com/index/gpt-2-1-5b-release/ , well before ChatGPT.

[Aerroon]

I think the diffusion model race would've kicked off anyway. Didn't it even start before ChatGPT was released?

I think the spark would've been lit either way.

It's kind of funny how both of these things kicked off within a few months.

[ModernMech]

Yeah, and Jurassic Park wouldn't have been a movie if they decided against breeding the dinosaurs.

[hibikir]

Competition is great, but it's so much better when it is all about shaving costs. I am afraid that what we are seeing here is an arms race with no moat: Something that will behave a lot like a Vickrey auction. The competitors all lose money in the investment, and since a winner takes all, and it never makes sense to stop the marginal investment when you think you have a chance to win, ultimately more resources are spent than the value ever created.

This might not be what we are facing here, but seeing how little moat anyone on AI has, I just can't discount the risk. And then instead of the consumers of today getting a great deal, we zoom out and see that 5x was spent developing the tech than it needed to, and that's not all that great economically as a whole. It's not as if, say, the weights from a 3 year old model are just useful capital to be reused later, like, say, when in the dot com boom we ended up with way too much fiber that was needed, but that could be bought and turned on profitably later.

[skybrian]

Three-year-old models aren't useful because there are (1) cheaper models that are roughly equivalent, and (2) better models.

If Sonnet 4.6 is actually "good enough" in some respects, maybe the models will just get cheaper along one branch, while they get better on a different branch.

[teaearlgraycold]

People are rapidly learning how to improve model capabilities and lower resource requirements. The models we throw away as we go are the steps we climbed along the way.

[raincole]

The real interesting part is how often you see people on HN deny this. People have been saying the token cost will 10x, or AI companies are intentionally making their models worse to trick you to consume more tokens. As if making a better model isn't not the most cutting-throat competition (probably the most competitive market in the human history) right now.

[IgorPartola]

I mean enshittification has not begun quite yet. Everyone is still raising capital so current investors can pass the bag to the next set. Soon as the money runs out monetization will overtake valuation as top priority. Then suddenly when you ask any of these models “how do I make chocolate chip cookies?” you will get something like:

> You will need one cup King Arthur All Purpose white flour, one large brown Eggland’s Best egg (a good source of Omega-3 and healthy cholesterol), one cup of water (be sure to use your Pyrex brand measuring cup), half a cup of Toll House Milk Chocolate Chips…

> Combine the sugar and egg in your 3 quart KitchenAid Mixer and mix until…

All of this will contain links and AdSense looking ads. For $200/month they will limit it to in-house ads about their $500/month model.

[Gigachad]

Only until the music stops. Racing to give away the most stuff for free can only last so long. Eventually you run out of other people’s money.

[maest]

Unfortunately, people naively assume all markets behave like this, even when the market, in reality, is not set up for full competition (due to monopolies, monopsonies, informational asymmetry, etc).

[XorNot]

And AI is currently killing a bunch of markets intentionally: the RAM deal for OpenAI wouldn't have gone through the way it did if it wasn't done in secret with anti-competitive restrictions.

There's a world of difference between what's happening and RAM prices if OAI and others were just bidding for produced modules as they released.

[poszlem]

This is a bit of a tangent, but it highlights exactly what people miss when talking about China taking over our industries. Right now, China has about 140 different car brands, roughly 100 of which are domestic. Compare that to Europe, where we have about 50 brands competing, or the US, which is essentially a walled garden with fewer than 40.

That level of internal fierce competition is a massive reason why they are beating us so badly on cost-effectiveness and innovation.

[tartoran]

It's the low cost of labor in addition to lack of environmental regulation that made China a success story. I'm sure the competition helps too but it's not main driver

[Gigachad]

Consequence is they are now facing an issue of “cancer villages” where the soil and water are unbelievably poisonous in many places.

[gmerc]

Until 2 remain, then it's extraction time.

[raffkede]

Or self host the oss models on the second hand GPU and RAM that's left when the big labs implode

[littlestymaar]

> how good the results are for consumers.

Only if you take consummer electronics out of the equation, because this AI arm race has wrecked havoc in the market for consumer GPUs, RAM, SSD and HDD.

If you take the arm race externalities into account, I'm very much unconvinced that we're better off than last year.

[yogurt0640]

I grew up with every service enshitified in the end. Whoever has more money wins the race and gets richer, that's free market for ya.

[MarsIronPI]

At a certain point though we can't only blame the free market or the companies. Consumers should know better than to choose products that are anti-consumer. The fact that they don't know better and don't care is the bigger problem. Until we figure out what to do about that any solution is going to be dangerously paternalistic.