Models are not commodities and are famously non fungible. Each model has its quirks and strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies.

I know because I see how people went over the 4o model. I can see opus behaving clearly differently enough that I pick it for certain tasks.

Is this really for comparable models though? Will folks at scale continue to choose Anthropic frontier AI model if OpenAI releases a similar generation at a 90% discount with comparable capabilities? It feels like the fungibility assumes delineation by capability _and_ cost. No one is choosing sonnet over opus at similar price points.

I could get into this line of debate that I find interesting but it doesn't contradict my point that the article itself is wrong and written on false assumptions.

I mean.. get into it! Isn't it much more interesting for you to defend the real world strength of your argument than it is to just gotcha the article? It's highly relevant to all of this either way. Don't leave us hanging!

I promise to do it if you agree that the one of the foundational arguments of the article is itself false. And it’s not a gotcha at all.

Once we agree on this, it could be worth discussing further.

Ok, so one last question - I think folks like Ed Zitron are too much I. The bear camp, he’s “AI is useless” and I’m not there, I do think AI changes the game. But everyone has been comparing OpenAI and Anthropic to the dotcom bubble, but isn’t -

The historical precedent on being able to capture value of a raw technology is not good. This is why the joke they promised us flying cars and we got ads.

So everyone says “Anthropic is like Uber”. But Uber is a service with people, not an underlying technology with commodity economics.

So in order for OpenAI and Anthropic to succeed (not google they have businesses to subsidize AI). LLMs would have to be the first technology where the businesses can capture value of the underlying technology itself.

So while I would concede that affordability is vulnerable to multiple angles of attack, I think that profitability is as well.

So what makes AI different than all previous technologies?

Depends on what you mean by capture technology? The internet was "captured" by FAANG. What makes OpenAI different?

No one in FAANG was selling the internet itself.

If we both agree that there will be FAANG type companies out of AI, what would they look like?

We're a few days out here, but I don't agree that a FAANG company will come out of AI, and I think this is a fundamental error to think there will be.

FAANG is rare/hard. It feels like, we've forgotten there's this whole giant middle of like normal companies. Oracle, Cisco, all the consulting companies. Boring companies with "only" a $500B market cap. I don't think any of the AI companies will synergize the like magic set of ingredients you need to be FAANG, and that's the point, they've grown so fast they "have" to to payback investors.

But it's weird that we call them a failure if they don't hit this utopian ideal that only a few companies in history have ever hit.