I said this years ago, LLMs are a commodity (or were becoming one at the time). They are dime a dozen. Even the frontier ones. OpenAI and Anthropic have no moat.
No moat and competition is good for consumers though.
My 0.02 on this is that for a given level of capability, yes, there is no moat. What’s frontier one day quickly becomes a commodity almost too cheap to meter within a year or two.
But there is always a use case for frontier models, even if they’re quite a bit more expensive. The set of things you can profitably do with better intelligence than everyone else is unbounded.
So yes, the number of tokens that get pushed through commodity models for very cheap will continue to grow, but so will the tokens for expensive frontier models. We’ll never run out of things to do with the latest geniuses who are twice as smart as last year’s geniuses.
The moat is the engine that builds and sells the latest geniuses, especially the compute. And no one will have more compute than American labs for the next 5-10 years.
> But there is always a use case for frontier models, even if they’re quite a bit more expensive. The set of things you can profitably do with better intelligence than everyone else is unbounded.
While this is trivially true, the question is if these remaining use cases that separate frontier models from non-frontier models bring in enough revenue to offset the massive spending of the frontier labs.
toephu2 · · focus · HN ↗
No moat and competition is good for consumers though.
senordevnyc · · focus · HN ↗
But there is always a use case for frontier models, even if they’re quite a bit more expensive. The set of things you can profitably do with better intelligence than everyone else is unbounded.
So yes, the number of tokens that get pushed through commodity models for very cheap will continue to grow, but so will the tokens for expensive frontier models. We’ll never run out of things to do with the latest geniuses who are twice as smart as last year’s geniuses.
The moat is the engine that builds and sells the latest geniuses, especially the compute. And no one will have more compute than American labs for the next 5-10 years.
rbehrends · · focus · HN ↗
While this is trivially true, the question is if these remaining use cases that separate frontier models from non-frontier models bring in enough revenue to offset the massive spending of the frontier labs.
senordevnyc · · focus · HN ↗