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Do AI companies work?

benn.substack.com

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Re: Do AI companies work?

#2
This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on.

I love it. More goodies for us

Re: Do AI companies work?

#4

This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on. I love it. More goodies for us

Agree completely.

Monetizing all of this is frankly...not my problem.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#5
Companies in the business of building models are forced to innovate on two things at once.

1. Training the next generation of models

2. Providing worldwide scalable infrastructure to serve those models (ideally at a profit)

It's hard enough to accomplish #1, without worrying about competing against the hyperscalers on #2. I think we'll see large licensing deals (similar to Anthropic + AWS, OpenAI + Azure) as one of the primary income sources for the model providers.

With the second (and higher margin) being user facing subscriptions. Right now 70% of OpenAI's revenue comes from chatgpt + enterprise gpt. I imagine Anthropic is similar, given the amount of investment in their generative UI. At the end of the day, model providers might just be consumer companies.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#6
the hype will never die. all the smartest people in industry and government believe that there is a very high probability that this technology is near the edge of starting the AGI landslide. you dont need AGI to start the AGI landslide, you just need AI tools that are smart enough to automate the process of discovering and building the first AGI models. every conceivable heuristic indicates that we are near the edge. and because of this, AI has now become a matter of national security. the research and investment wont stop, because it cant, because it is now an arms race. this wont just fizzle out. it will be probed and investigated to absolute exhaustion before anyone feels safe enough to stop participating in the race. if you have been keeping up you will know that high level federal bureaucrats are now directly involved in openAI.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#7

This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on. I love it. More goodies for us

I'm already keeping an eye on what NVidia gets into next... because that will inevitably be the "Next big thing". This is the third(ish) round of this pattern that I can recall, I'm probably wrong about the exact count, but NVidia is really good at figuring out how to be powering the "Next big thing". So alternatively... I should probably invest in the utilities powering whatever Datacenters are using the powerhungry monsters at the center of it all.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#8

This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on. I love it. More goodies for us

No, it means creating a bunch of unprofitable businesses that make it really hard for folks trying to build a sustainable business without VC money.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#9
This article, and all the articles like it, are missing most of the puzzle.

Models don’t just compete on capability. Over the last year we’ve seen models and vendors differentiate along a number of lines in addition to capability:

- Safety

- UX

- Multi-modality

- Reliability

- Embeddability

And much more. Customers care about capability, but that’s like saying car owners care about horsepower — it’s a part of the choice but not the only piece.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#10

This is like when VCs were funding all kinds of ride share, bike share, food delivery, cannabis delivery, and burning money so everyone gets subsidized stuff while the market figures out wtf is going on. I love it. More goodies for us

What goodies can I get from AI companies though?
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