Thread

1. gradus_ad · 1790701889 · focus · HN ↗

   Ominous for the industry and investors that token price is becoming the main battleground. Could be Anthropic's rationale for IPOing this year.

   1. mixdup · 1790702708 · focus · HN ↗

      Another piece of evidence on the pile that the sudden panic and desire to "slow down" is because they're hitting the plateau on capability

      Which, honestly, is fine. A lot of juice to squeeze in efficiency and even if models got zero more capable, making the capability that is already here cheaper is a huge win for everyone (except Nvidia)

      1. luma · 1790705106 · focus · HN ↗

         Some version of this claim has been made for the past 4 years. There's a data cliff, there's no more compute to buy, the financials don't make sense and all of these orgs will be out of business by end of quarter.

         Not once has any of these predictions come true, the pace of progress has continued on it's exponential trajectory since ChatGPT first came to the public's attention.

         So why now? What is special about today that suggests all of this is coming to a screeching halt despite all evidence to the contrary?

         1. digdugdirk · 1790707387 · focus · HN ↗

            The difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point. LLMs are a tool, and that tool is useful but not incredibly valuable unto itself.

            To make a manufacturing analogy - ChatGPT was a manual machining mill, and in the years after we've gone from that to a 3-axis CNC mill. Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality. But the big win was that initial jump from manual control to CNC. Why would I pay an extra $2 million for my CNC machine when I could just design my parts to be simpler to produce instead? The AI labs are trying to make these incredibly complex tools, but the market doesn't want/need them so they're competing on price for the tools that people do use. By selling their metaphorical CNC machines for half of what they cost to produce.

            Oh, and we've bet the entire economy on the hope that fancier CNC machines will magically solve all our problems in all industries, from healthcare to the legal system.

            So - will AI progress continue to improve? Sure. Will we continue lighting money on fire in order to make it happen? That remains to be seen.

            1. famouswaffles · 1790708974 · focus · HN ↗

               >The difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point.

               In some aspects sure, but in others no. Open AI's goal is to build "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." and Astra was a big jump in that. There still isn't a better model for computer use and vision/spatial work. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D asset creation are all things Astra is >> at than any other model. I'm sure you don't care about any of that so it's easy enough to slip by you but this analogy - "Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality." is dead wrong.

               1. digdugdirk · 1790773397 · focus · HN ↗

                  Right, that's exactly my point though. Those are absolutely valuable use cases. But are they useful enough to justify a trillion dollar valuation? Or is most of the economic value in the stuff that already exists, and can be performed nearly as well by qwen/deepseek/kimi/GLM/etc?

                  And beyond that - how long until those individual Astra capabilities are distilled into separate Qwen-27b size models, with harnesses and scaffolds specifically designed to support that functionality?

                  1. famouswaffles · 1790779874 · focus · HN ↗

                     >Right, that's exactly my point though. Those are absolutely valuable use cases. But are they useful enough to justify a trillion dollar valuation?

                     Replacing white collar work would be worth dozens of trillions of dollars. Software is not the only valuable job that can be done on a computer.

                     OpenAI and Anthropic already have what it takes right now to become trillion dollar companies even if the above doesn't materialize.

                     Chatgpt is used by a billion people every week. Their ads program hit $1B ARR in 200 days. And Anthropic is growing so fast they're in track to hit an Annual Revenue Run Rate of $100B before they IPO.

                     >And beyond that - how long until those individual Astra capabilities are distilled into separate Qwen-27b size models, with harnesses and scaffolds specifically designed to support that functionality?

                     How long until...you could say that about the capabilities of past models but OpenAI still dwarf everyone else in consumer usage, and Anthropic still have enterprise usage on lock. In the end, neither the billion+ users of gpt or the enterprise customers are going to give a shit. And specialized models often perform worse than generalized ones.

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