By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
LurkerJ 2 days ago
Edit Thread
sc94597 said:
Ryuu96 said:

The issue is a company managing to create an AI model which is just as good, or simply good enough, when compared to the competition, at a fraction of the cost and resources, so why are people like Sam Altman asking for 100s of billions of dollars? US companies have been leading the AI battle and that has been driving their valuations, now investors will wonder just how far these companies really are in the lead, with tens of billions being spent with zero profits in return for years on end.

Of course AI won't die but it shows a little fragility in the US companies hold on the AI market and this after all the song and dance about $500bn being invested into AI by US Companies whilst OpenAI loses $5bn+ per year. OpenAI is just one AI company though, but it is the most well known and Sam Altman comes across as a massive con artist and I do not believe OpenAI will be the one to make the breakthroughs and the problem is, a lot of companies are hedging a lot on OpenAI.

Nvidia is down 16% now, I'm sure it will rebound but there's fragility being shown for US companies.

Nvidia Stock Plunges 15% As NVDA Heads To Biggest Market Cap Loss Ever

None of the people who keep up with this technology are surprised that the cost for reasoning models is coming down. The surprise is mostly that it is coming from a Chinese company, as Chinese companies have been behind for a while now and they're under a chip embargo. These advancements happen in cycles and advancements are made across companies, not within a single one. 

Basically you have Google and Nvidia doing fundamental research. They're the ones really pushing the boundaries of what we know. 

Open AI/Anthropic/Meta/Mistral and now Deepseek are basically implementing this fundamental research into practical applications. This follows a cost-cycle, where if you want to be the first-to-release (as OpenAI tends to want to be) it costs a lot, but then as optimizations are discovered you can reduce the cost over time. So Open AI released o1-preview (an iteration of a model they first innovated in November 2023) in September and open-source has pretty much caught up with it in January at a cheaper price. That's not surprising. o3 will release in February, and you basically have the companies leap-frogging each-other until the next paradigm shift occurs (which seems to be Agents/Operators and/or an implementation of Google's Titans architecture.) Then the cycle repeats itself again until we get to the point of recursive self-improvement.

I do think there will be a bubble bust, just like the Dot-Com bubble or any other capitalist business cycle, but the market will exist nevertheless. 

Yes, those advancements happen in cycles and sometimes they happen outside the bigger companies you listed… by startups that quickly get acquired with no meaningful pushback, that’s why “the market” isn’t usually spooked.

But a Chinese company that we can’t buy, open source since day 0, a model that can be run locally if desired, this is highly unusual and the closest we have to an actual openAI, ironically. Even when the dust settles, this will always be huge. No wonder so many American CEOs had to say something before they went to sleep.

There are the philosophical aspects to what happened that makes this delicious to watch and why many of us enjoying this even on a subconscious level that we can’t fully articulate. Just few days after all these spineless tech CEOs lined up behind Trump asking for more deregulations, more freedom, less government oversight, and in return, they’ll somehow keep America ahead of everyone else, at least when it comes to AI and silicon valley toys.

But the truth is, China has been competitive at building almost everything. Building impressive infrastructure like ultra highspeed trains, 5G networks, entire high tech cities, manufacturing facilities, automation, making ridiculously cheap useful stuff that I use in every room in my house (and if mandarin was a more popular language they’d probably have a better Hollywood and entertainment content).

It’s as if you can have a government with missions that achieves all of the above while providing affordable healthcare and housing, and now they seem to be doing just fine as well in areas like AI despite all the restrictions? What does a modern-day Western democracy have to say about all of this? 

It turns out that governments that build most of their strategies around pleasing the private sector and big donors are falling behind at everything, (including having the high moral ground and saying no to genocides, and don't get me started on annexing Greenland and childishly renaming gulfs). I'm just rambling now, but this is why the deregulations talks in Europe to “attract growth” these days frustrate me, it’s not better education that we need, it’s not better living the standards, it’s not healthcare that works and actually enables workers to be productive, it’s not affordable housing, it’s not high speed rail connecting cities, no, it’s how we can do what Elon thinks an efficient government should look like. No ambitious missions and long-term plans whatsoever, our solutions are down to pushing up and down the taxes, regulations and consumption levers, pathetic.

off topic but this gave me a much needed chuckle:

edit:

Admittedly, some of the above sounds like hyperbole, to balance things out a little bit, I did like the Biden administration mission to bring manufacturing back and catch up with China (yes, catch up), I also liked Lina Khan and her vision for what competition should look like. And I did want labour to learn from some of that, too bad the same administration didn't take winning a second term seriously.

Last edited by LurkerJ - 2 days ago