Live data from Hacker News

Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

foundationcapital.com

111–120 of 138 posts

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#111
post #101

DeepSeek has demonstrated that there is no technical moat. Model training costs are plummeting, and the margins for APIs will just get slimmer. Plus model capabilities are plateauing. Once model improvement slows down enough, seems to me like the battle is to be fought in the application layer. Whoever can make the killer app will capture the market.

Model capabilities are not plateauing; in fact, they are improving exponentially. I believe people struggle to grasp how AI works and how it differs from other technologies we invented. Our brains tend to think linearly; that's why we see AI as an "app." With AI (ASI), everything accelerates. There will be no concept of an "app" in ASI world.

Hype. We were already plateauing with next token prediction and letting the models think out loud has simply pushed the frontier a little bit in purely test-taking domains.

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#112

DeepSeek has demonstrated that there is no technical moat. Model training costs are plummeting, and the margins for APIs will just get slimmer. Plus model capabilities are plateauing. Once model improvement slows down enough, seems to me like the battle is to be fought in the application layer. Whoever can make the killer app will capture the market.

Something worth noting is that ChatGPT currently is the killer app -- DeepSeek's current chart-topping app notwithstanding (not clear if viral blip or long-term trend).

You can't be a killer app if your competitor is just as good and free.

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#113
"Linux ultimately prevailed-not because it was better from the start, but because it allowed developers to modify the code freely, run it more securely and affordably, and build a broader ecosystem that enabled more capabilities than any closed system"

Deepseek followed llama and will be followed by others in the usual mushroom fashion of open source. People really dont appreciate the magnitude of the disruptive force that is unleashed by the open source paradigm. In a year from now the landscape will be brimming with new initiatives. In a few years nobody will even remember "open"ai.

Conventional economic theory will always misread the future of computing (and thus "AI"). The zero marginal cost and infinite replicability is not a bug, its a feature. But so far we dont really have a good model how to think about it and merge it with mainstream business models. Something must pay the bills eventually but these are very different bills from those of conventional scarcity based businesses. Ironically in the end the main scarcity is human ingenuity. Read the interview of the Deepseek founder on why their models are open source.

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#114
post #73

People are announcing the death of foundational models too early. Don’t people realize that the big AI players will take all of the proprietary things they’ve been building up behind closed doors and simply layer onto them all the winning techniques everyone else is publishing (like what DeepSeek has used)? DeepSeek itself is taking ideas that have proven out in various other papers and stacking them up to produce th…

Yeah, the cost figures need more scrutiny; they started with Llama3 which they got for free; had they had to build it from scratch it would have cost more than $6M. But as for your first paragraph: even if the "big AI players" have some secret sauce that will make their products better (and that they can actually keep secret), it seems unlikely it would be enough to command higher prices durably. A model would have t…

You make a good point, that maybe the models won’t perform much better with those improvements, or at least not enough to get people to pay more.

I’m curious about the Llama3 bit - do you have a source for that? I’ve been hearing they trained using OpenAI outputs (not sure how that would work).

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#115
post #3

Whether you love or hate OpenAI, the CapEx involved with this company will be viewed as historic in the future, and will change (has already changed) the paradigm of how tech startups/projects are funded

It changed the paradigm negatively so far, it vacuumed so much money that anything non-AI is not getting much funding, it locked CapEx and now it's looking like there won't be a massive RoI for the capital spent.

The AI hype might have as well setback a lot of other products that never got the necessary funding to get up from the ground, it's not looking pretty.

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#116

DeepSeek has demonstrated that there is no technical moat. Model training costs are plummeting, and the margins for APIs will just get slimmer. Plus model capabilities are plateauing. Once model improvement slows down enough, seems to me like the battle is to be fought in the application layer. Whoever can make the killer app will capture the market.

Something worth noting is that ChatGPT currently is the killer app -- DeepSeek's current chart-topping app notwithstanding (not clear if viral blip or long-term trend).

Killer app for what platform?

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#117
post #73

People are announcing the death of foundational models too early. Don’t people realize that the big AI players will take all of the proprietary things they’ve been building up behind closed doors and simply layer onto them all the winning techniques everyone else is publishing (like what DeepSeek has used)? DeepSeek itself is taking ideas that have proven out in various other papers and stacking them up to produce th…

Yeah, the cost figures need more scrutiny; they started with Llama3 which they got for free; had they had to build it from scratch it would have cost more than $6M. But as for your first paragraph: even if the "big AI players" have some secret sauce that will make their products better (and that they can actually keep secret), it seems unlikely it would be enough to command higher prices durably. A model would have t…

I don't know where you're getting your information from. Maybe you're confusing DeepSeek v3/r1 and the distilled r1 models.

DeepSeek V3/R1 architecture isn't anything like Llama 3. Llama 3 isn't even a mixture of experts, not to mention the various other differences like attention compression etc

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#118
post #20

It’s the year 2000. We have the internet, a technology that will change the world. Yahoo is the most valuable company on earth. Among the coolest things people do is go to CompUSA and pay money for a web browser, Netscape Navigator, because it supports the tag so you can make your geocities page even more awesome. Google is still operating out of a garage somewhere, and won’t be household name until after the bubble…

Before or after the bubble popped ?

During

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tools are you using to delegate?

My own app, it's called Telosnex. Unfortunately, the current available version doesn't have the agent stuff yet. Hopefully in a week, realistically two. I had the existing client app I've released-but-not-released-out-loud. Couple days before Christmas, for fun, I spent a couple hours wiring up the Anthropic Model Context Protocol filesystem server example. Within an hour it was clear this was special and I needed to…

> Hopefully in a week, realistically two.

Wouldn't it be just a few prompts to get it done?

Re: Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

#120
post #101

DeepSeek has demonstrated that there is no technical moat. Model training costs are plummeting, and the margins for APIs will just get slimmer. Plus model capabilities are plateauing. Once model improvement slows down enough, seems to me like the battle is to be fought in the application layer. Whoever can make the killer app will capture the market.

Model capabilities are not plateauing; in fact, they are improving exponentially. I believe people struggle to grasp how AI works and how it differs from other technologies we invented. Our brains tend to think linearly; that's why we see AI as an "app." With AI (ASI), everything accelerates. There will be no concept of an "app" in ASI world.

They are absolutely not improving exponentially, by any metric. This is a completely absurd claim. I don’t think you understand what exponential means.
Post reply on HN