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XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

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Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#71

Post by xnx »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #48
martinald wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm astonished at the stickiness of chatgpt though. It's clearly not the best platform/model but all my none tech friends just equate LLMs = ChatGPT (4o as well).

o3/o3-pro is probably the best model, or very close to being the best model, overall. It beats Grok 4 in writing/composition and analysis tasks. [1] Performance is a toss-up between o3 and Claude 4 Opus, but I find o3 easier to interact with and more trustworthy. (Less likely to push back against requests and more likely to attempt to fulfill them in good faith.) 4.5 is also great for certain things. Of all models, i…

No criticism, but I'm continually surprised how many comparisons leave out Gemini.

Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#72

Post by 827a »

bee_rider wrote: post #65
827a wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that last paragraph is the crux of it: No one is using Grok. They have no path to profitability. They have very low traction among consumers, and even lower traction among enterprises. Their CEO seems to think that copy-pasting code into a web browser is a good strategy for attracting programmers. Its most common usage is on X where people say "@grok is this true", which is fine, except its unclear if anyone…

I wonder to what extent it matters… but, Musk has mostly lead companies where he comes with a new competitor against incredibly stagnant competition, right? (banking, cars, rockets). He seems to have a strategy of convincing some young engineers to work really hard on a neat new idea. That, combined with the stagnant competition, produces a sudden dramatic leap past the competition that gets people interested. LLMs w…

The difference is, his stagnant competition in the AI space is way, way less stagnant than Boeing and Ford. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are not stagnant; they're the hottest companies out there paying million dollar salaries.

Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#73

Post by bee_rider »

827a wrote: post #72
bee_rider wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder to what extent it matters… but, Musk has mostly lead companies where he comes with a new competitor against incredibly stagnant competition, right? (banking, cars, rockets). He seems to have a strategy of convincing some young engineers to work really hard on a neat new idea. That, combined with the stagnant competition, produces a sudden dramatic leap past the competition that gets people interested. LLMs w…

The difference is, his stagnant competition in the AI space is way, way less stagnant than Boeing and Ford. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are not stagnant; they're the hottest companies out there paying million dollar salaries.

Yah, that’s what I was getting at. TBH I’m skeptical that AI will live up to the hype. But stagnant they certainly are not!

Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#74

Post by mercer »

Aurornis wrote: post #16
Retric wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I don’t think investors really internalize that LLM companies have effectively zero moat. Customers can easily jump ship. Everyone is using effectively the same compute, nearly identical training data, very similar algorithms, etc. Worse past investments in a model become outdated quickly.

I think Hacker News readers underestimate how sticky the typical customer is. The average subscriber to these services isn’t following a constant stream of LLM news and jumping from platform to platform every time the leaderboard changes slightly. The average customer signs up and then inertia and familiarity take over. They stay signed and comfortable.

Also don't forget the 'memory' feature. As LLM providers get better at tailoring the LLM to the user, and probably obfuscating the details on how this user-specific memory works, it will be harder to switch to another provider.

Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#75

Post by rs186 »

v5v3 wrote: post #59
rs186 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer of what, model? In terms of AI coding assistant, almost every product out there allows you switch to a different model with a single click. If Gemini is not giving you the answer you want, what do you do? Switch to Claude and bang you have it. The only thing that has some stickiness is products like ChatGPT. But that's so much more than just a model -- it's a product with many features smoothly integrated. x…

>xAI does not currently have any product that is sticky for the average user. Err... What about twitter? Where it is firmly embedded. And Telegram recently has been paid to do the same.

ok these features exist. Do we know they are sticky?

Re: XAI seeks up to $200B valuation in next fundraising

#76

Post by 7e »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #41
lemoncookiechip wrote: post #4

I find it odd that investors are still so motivated to drop money into AI, specifically LLMs, not because I don't see value in the technology, I do, but because it feels to me like it only takes a few months (if that) for your company which might currently dominate with the leading product, to be left behind by someone else who just came out with a better, cheaper, and faster product. I guess this is true for most te…

I used to not understand as well, but then a friend asked me a question: "When Claude recommends a book, why doesn't it just link directly to Amazon and get a referral fee?" I believe what investor's are chasing in LLMs is the same thing that Zuckerberg was chasing in the metaverse: not a new "technology" a new medium . The key insight in the development of the web was that a few companies can effectively control the…

Not at all, there is no moat around LLMs, but social media has a huge moat because of network effects. Mobile phones have a huge moat as well.

LLMs are more like web browsers. Nobody makes any money there, they are commodities. Look at Netscape and Firefox. Edge and even Chrome.

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