The US companies still have trillion dollar valuations like there is a monopoly. There just isn't one. They are all within a few percent of each other on the benchmarks.
The slightly lower Chinese open models are good enough for almost everything, too, and much cheaper. Like with humans there is plenty of employment for people with below genius level IQ's.
I feel like the frontier labs are going to serve fast/lower intelligence models at a better per token cost than the open chinese models. You're telling me that in the long run, you're going to self-host your own ai infra for cheaper than google can serve it to you? I don't really buy it. I think the dedicated AI data centers are going to serve AI at a lower marginal cost than random businesses self-hosting, and then it's a question of how much of that margin they can capture.
Agree entirely but that's the point, if it's a margin knife-fight with marginal product differentiation/pricing power nobody is going to be making bank.
But I will require massive amount of capital. And if one of the leaders is temporarily in a bad position financially (and OpenAI and Anthropic have massive amount of debt), they can't buy more gpus anymore and may fold very quickly. Then only one may survive, although I suppose antitrust legislation could work against that.
Yes, it may come down to how well they get efficiencies from scale.
People always compare the inflated API prices, but subscription prices of American models are competitive for the intelligence. You get >20x the subscription cost in tokens.
Is there a dividing line between good enough and best in class capabilities? It's blurry from where I stand. Will model makers cede ground or is there a market making moment up for grabs (singularity)?
For the types of basic business tasks my company does, we have hit the line where if it never gets any better, we are fine. On our own hardware. For $25k worth of DGX Sparks, we have essentially the output of a few admin-level FTEs.
The slightly lower Chinese open models are good enough for almost everything, too, and much cheaper. Like with humans there is plenty of employment for people with below genius level IQ's.