It's why Amodei has spoken in favor of stricter export controls and Altman has pushed for regulation. They have no moat.
I'm thankful for the various open-weighted Chinese models out there. They've kept good pace with flagship models, and they're integral to avoiding a future where 1-2 companies own the future of knowledge labor. America's obsession with the shareholder in lieu of any other social consideration is ugly.
For now people identify LLMs and AI with the ChatGPT brand.
This seems like it might be the stickiest thing they can grab ahold of in the long term.
I would be really curious to know what tools you've tried and are using where gemini feels better to use
One thing I don’t get though, if superintelligence is really 5 years away, what’s going to be the point of a fixed-interest 100y bond.
openai and anthropic know already what will happen if they go public :)
But, also, probably google.
Google/Apple/Nvidia - those with warchests that can treat this expenditure as R&D, write it off, and not be up to their eyeballs in debt - those are the most likely to win. It may still be a dark-horse previously unknown company but if it is that company will need to be a lot more disciplined about expenditures.
Artificial Analysis isn't perfect, but it is an independent third party that actually runs the benchmarks themselves, and they use a wide range of benchmarks. It is a better automated litmus test than any other that I've been able to find in years of watching the development of LLMs.
And the gap has been rapidly shrinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NBILspM4c4&t=642s
It’s much better than the previous open models but it’s not yet close.
I don't think this is accurate. Maybe it will change in the future but it seems like the Chinese models aren't keeping up with actually training techniques, they're largely using distillation techniques. Which means they'll always be catching up and never at the cutting edge. https://x.com/Altimor/status/2024166557107311057
You link to an assumption, and one that's seemingly highly motivated.
Have you used the Chinese models? IMO Kimi K2.5 beats everything but Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1... and it's not exactly inferior to the latter, it's just different. It's much better at most writing tasks, and its "Deep Research" mode is by a wide margin the best in the business. (OpenAI's has really gone downhill for some reason.)
(I work at OpenAI, but on the infra side of things not on models)
That's pretty cutting edge to me.
EDIT: It's not a swarm — it's closer to a voting system. All three models get the same prompt simultaneously via parallel API calls (OpenAI-compatible endpoints), and the system uses weighted consensus to pick a winner. Each model has a weight (e.g. step-3.5-flash=4, kimi-k2.5=3, glm-5=2) based on empirically observed reliability.
The flow looks like:
1. User query comes in
2. All 3 models (+ optionally a local model like qwen3-abliterated:8b) get called in parallel
3. Responses come back in ~2-5s typically
4. The system filters out refusals and empty responses
5. Weighted voting picks the winner — if models agree on tool use (e.g. "fetch this URL"), that action executes
6. For text responses, it can also synthesize across multiple candidates
Tooling: it's a single Python agent (~5200 lines) with protocol-based tool dispatch — 110+ operations covering filesystem, git, web fetching, code analysis, media processing, a RAG knowledge base, etc. The quorum sits in front of the LLM decision layer, so the agent autonomously picks tools and chains actions. Purpose is general — coding, research, data analysis, whatever. I won't include it for length but I just kicked off a prompt to get some info on the recent Trump tariff Supreme Court decision: it fetched stock data from Benzinga/Google Finance, then researched the SCOTUS tariff ruling across AP, CNN, Politico, The Hill, and CNBC, all orchestrated by the quorum picking which URLs to fetch and synthesizing the results, continuing until something like 45 URLs were fully processed. Output was longer than a typical single chatbot response, because you get all the non-determinism from what the models actually ended up doing in the long-running execution, and then it needs to get consensus, which means all of the responses get at least one or N additional passes across the other models to get to that consensus.
Cost-wise, these three models are all either free-tier or pennies per million tokens. The entire session above (dozens of quorum rounds, multiple web fetches) cost less than a single Opus prompt.RAM shortage is probably a bubble indicator itself. That industry doesn’t believe enough in the long term demand to build out more capacity.
Plus producers will now feel free to expand production and dump even more onto the market. This is great if you needed that amount of supply, but it's terrible if you were just trying to deprive others.
https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Similarly, OpenAI has made some massive investments in AMD hardware, and have also ensured that they aren't tied to nvidia.
I think it's nvidia that has less of a moat than many imagine they do, given that they're a $4.5T company. While small software shops might define their entire solution via CUDA, to the large firms this is just one possible abstraction engine. So if an upstart just copy pastes a massive number of relatively simple tensor cores and earns their business, they can embrace it.
Anthropic on the other hand is very capable and given the success of claude code and cowork, I think they will maintain their lead across knowledge work for a long time just by having the best data to keep improving their models and everything around. It's also the hottest tech conpany rn, like Google were back in the day.
If I need to bet on two companies that will win the AI race in the west, it's Anthropic and Google. Google on the consumer side mostly and Anthropic in enterprise. OpenAI will probably IPO soon to shift the risk to the public.
Edit: one thing I didn’t think about is Anthropic more or less runs at the pleasure of AWS. Of Amazon sees Anthropic as a threat to AWS then it could be lights out.
I think that OpenAI and Microsoft is a more challenging partnership with much more overlap.
Enterprise switching costs aren’t 0, but they’re much less than most other categories, especially as models mature and become more fungible.
The best moat I can think of is a patentable technique that facilitates a huge leap that Anthropic can defend, but even then, Chinese companies could easily ignore those patents. And I don’t even know if AI companies could stick to those guns as their training is essentially theft of huge portions of copyrighted material.
OpenAI's biggest problem as well as their biggest advantage is that they have way, way more users than anyone else. Unfortunately for them the users they have dont pay for shit and they dont serve ads so more users = more money wasted right now. But its unlikely that will always be the case. If OpenAI turns on ads, most users will not leave because retail users hate change, and suddenly their massive user base is a boon instead of a problem.
On the user side, memory and context, especially as continual learning is developed, is pretty valuable. I use Claude Code to help run a lot of parts of my business, and it has so much context about what I do and the different products I sell that it would be annoying to switch at this point. I just used it to help me close my books for the year, and the fact that it was looking at my QuickBooks transactions with an understanding of my business definitely saved me a lot of time explaining.
On the enterprise side, I think businesses are going to be hesitant to swap models in and out, especially when they're used for core product functionality. It's annoying to change deterministic software, and switching probabilistic models seems much more fraught.
LLMs are useful and these companies will continue to find ways to capture some of the value they are creating.
I am yet to see in-depth analysis that supports this claim
At first the answer was "I can't say anything that might hurt people" but with a little persuasion it went further.
The answer wasn't the current official answer but way more nuanced that Wikipedia's article. More in the vein of "we don't know for sure", "different versions", "external propaganda", "some officials have lied and been arrested since"
In the end, when I asked whether I should trust the government or ask for multiple source, it strongly suggested to use multiple sources to form an opinion.
= not as censored as I expected.
OpenAI I'm sorry to say are all over the place. They're good at what they do, but they try to do too much and need near ponzi style growth to sustain their business model.
Anthropic has actually cracked Agentic AI that is generally useful. No other company has done that.
Enterprise customers will gladly pay 10x to 20x for American models. Of course this means American tech companies will start to fall behind, combined with our recent Xenophobia.
Almost all the top AI researchers are either Chinese nationals or recent immigrants. With the way we've been treating immigrants lately ( plenty of people with status have been detained, often for weeks), I can't imagine the world's best talent continuing to come here.
It's going to be an interesting decade y'all.
I rebalanced the same as I always have.
Then again, I'm 20+ years from accessing it, so I figure I'm about 5 years out from moving more to S&P tracking and bonds. I am not a financial advisor.
Also, there aren't a ton of great options that are safer.
This is the ONE thing you aren’t supposed to do as a passive investor. A play like this will cause you to lose upside almost always, and some people never get back in and miss out on almost a lifetime of growth.
THE MARKETS ARE NOT RATIONAL.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/openai-chief-sam-altman-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-...
And then the EU said “OK, let’s regulate”, and Altman said “no, not like that!”
https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-may-leave-eu-if-re...
Note the dates. The above article was posted merely a week after yours.
Altman only cares about regulations if they can benefit him, he doesn’t do it out of some sense of morality. To these tech bros, “regulation” means “codify into law whatever I’m doing, and disallow everything else so I don’t have competition.”
Is this supposed to be ancient history already ?
No disrespect, just sharing my thoughts. I see “Elmo Musk” and “Orange Man” etc., and I immediately think this is not worth reading (regardless of my opinion of those persons).
I'm much better off reading diverse opinions and deciding what to believe based on what they actually say, instead of imposing petty rules and self-censoring what I read, and self-cultivating ignorance.
You'd be much better off, mentally healthier, and subjected to less propaganda if instead you ignored what "Scam Altman" and "Elmo Musk" and "Orange Man" write instead of what people who criticize them write, since they have such asymmetrically bigger platforms and pro-oligarchy biases than their critics, and they also regularly call people childish names themselves.
TL;DR: you're choosing to ignore the wrong people.
He 100% deserves his title for Loopt alone. I don't have any credibility to being with, this is an anonymous wantrepreneur shitposting forum not the US congress. I know people lurking here love these sociopaths but come on...
I've observed a very different state. From what I've seen the sky-high expectations of AI have come down quite a lot.
they hype for AGI has certainly deflated, i haven't heard anything about that being right around the corner and the implications in a while now. The hype and doom now seems to be coming from software devs only, the front page news articles about AGI have pretty much stopped for me.
/"front page news" to me is the google news, US, Business, and Technology tabs
There were not with WeWork.
The SpaceX/xAI IPO will be more interesting.
xAi isn't even a point of discussion.. it's just a scheme to rip off investors.
WeWork.. hard to take anyone seriously that ever invested in this bad boy.
I know some commercial property owners in my hometown let their lowest-desirability storefronts sit vacant for twenty or thirty years (!) in order to prevent commercial property rent from falling across their entire portfolio. Turns out you can pay a lot of property taxes with not much revenue, and there hasn’t historically been regulatory pressure to pay an escalating “empty tax” to compel landlord pricing to behave according to supply and demand pricing models. Wework is still a terrible investment for an investor, but if you’re looking to bet long with no call and have the patient of decades, it’s not the worst plan. (There are certainly worse ways to gamble your money on the commercial property market!)
Masayoshi Son may not be providing returns for its investors but he is providing entertainment for the rest of the world.
As for OpenAI, I'm not sure if Altman is an idiot or fraudster, claims about reaching AGI/ASI with scaling and investing in that fashion was always delusional at best or fraudulent at worst, maybe he just hoped to divert enough money to engineers to make actual breakthroughs or that the hardware would become a moat but competitors have kept pace, and I fully agree that they are mostly now only hanging on with an insanely bad cost structure now.
The reason GP said SpaceX/xAI is that these are now a single company.
But what happens if they can no longer sell those tangible goods at a massive profit, and they gave return to their roots selling to gamers? When the boom ends is when massive accounting fraud could happen.
They do, but that's not the (full) story here. Companies tend to easily migrate upwards, to a higher volume and/or higher profit margin market, and hardly (if ever) in the opposite direction. The painful restructuring necessary to enable this kind of reverse change is also damaging to the company brand, culture, and self-perception. If they ever get in such position, they may of course recover, but I wouldn't bet money on that.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/90aa74a5-b39d-4131-a138-367726cb1...
Easy, they just have to sell their overpriced vram chips (which haven't been manufactured yet), from their GPUs (which haven't been bought yet) which are in their data centers (the ones they're planning to build "soon"). It really isn't rocket science
OAI's most valuable assets are hardware that will be worthless in 6-8 years. The second most valuable assets are the code which other companies are doing just fine with their own. The third is the hype halo that keeps them getting these deals that are disconnected from reality. Nothing there is holding up the economy.
They only have 4,000 employees. If they all lost their jobs, it would barely be a blip in a monthly jobs report. It's not as though millions of people will lose their jobs disrupting the economy like COVID.
The only downside is some imaginary money vanishes and some investors take a haircut on the imaginary money.
I have the disks but only random old gaming PCs to put them in. I think I'm going to expand my Proxmox cluster and run Ceph so that I don't have to pay that 6x markup or whatever the fuck it is these days.
I'm tired, man. I'm tired of living in this world where AI is simultaneously an unstoppable eschatological juggernaut that's already making everything worse and at best is going to steal my livelihood and destroy my family's future, but also a hype driven shell game with full buy-in from world leaders and the moneyed elite who see a golden opportunity to extract unprecedented amounts of wealth for themselves before the West falls and they have to make other arrangements.
I paid $35 for 8GB DDR3 ram in 2012: https://i.imgur.com/e7XKcqX.png
Here is a 20$ 16GB DDR3 purchase in 2022: https://i.imgur.com/1V1FpYh.png
That same ram is now 40$: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L8C37DH
So if we normalize prices for 16GB:
2012: 70$
2022: 20$
2026: 40$
I think we are still ahead for DDR3 but I really would prefer prices to be 20$ again. :)
Surprisingly looking my order history I found a different brand 16GB DDR3 for 15$ in early 2025. Not sure if I even noticed the price drop because it was cheap enough for me I just impulse purchased it.
I like his podcast, Better Offline[0]. Some here might also like it, some would definitely hate it. He's not right about everything he says, but I agree with a lot of it. He has a newsletter for those who don't like podcasts.
hah Nvidia just announced the deal with OpenAI is now $30B instead of $100B.
Great promise, replace all your call centre staff, then your developers with AI. It is cheaper, but only because the AI companies are not charging you what it really costs to do the work.
The fully allocated cost of one call to a human agent is $3-5. That pays for a lot of inference.
Are you kidding me?! It costs that much for the utter trash that I have deal with every company? A poor 1990s VOIP sounding connection to some random place in the Philippines while I try to get my issue solved in excruciating annoyance when they cannot follow my standard english flow or they cannot speak loud or clearly.
(Yes full time direct hire “blue badge” employee with the same 4 year base + signing bonus + 4 year 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting).
I have heard of companies that have gotten it down to 50 cents per call using foreign customer service agents. But those aren’t the companies that are going to pay AWS ProServe bill rates or even the rate my current employee charges companies at my bill rate (not saying that’s what I make)
I calculated the full cost of a call to be $0.05 cents a minute when handled by AI and that includes charges for a 1800 number and the varios other AWS services it uses.
Nova does the processing of the text after a separate voice to text service (Lex)
It’s all fun and games till it’s not. All this capital investment is going to start hitting earnings as massive deprecation and/or mark-to-market valuation adjustments and if the bubble pops (or even just cools a bit) the math starts to look real ugly real quick.
OpenAi gets 30b, buys chips from nvidia for 30b.
How is that an investment?
well if OpenAi uses a credit card at least they'll get a ton of rewards points :)
Think about how valuable HN is for a company whose primary market is professional devs.
If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.
