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Comment by supern0va | Hacker News Reader

>The actual risk that the author does not even broach upon for investors... the thing that will actually torpedo this massive investment are the open source open weight chinese models that commoditize the entire endeavor. If you don't have a monopoly, you cannot rugpull and 6x the costs on the consumer.

This is the thing: let's just reason it out. What if OpenAI and Anthropic both fail and end up in bankruptcy? What is the impact to the hyperscalers?

...they just start selling open weight model inference to businesses, or whatever other entity picks up the scraps from the collapsed labs.

It's abundantly evident that there's major demand for compute, and that it isn't going anywhere.

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I think the nuance that's being missed here is that the profit margin of inference serving when there's perfect competition is close to 0.

Zero profit means no recouping investment costs effectively bursting the bubble.

Technological progress can come at extreme pace but the lack of profits can still torch both the startup frontier labs and the hyperscalers.

We plebians can then pick up H100 gpus off Ebay to help us invent new superconductors and generate waifu videos in pur basement...

Profit margin determines whether OpenAI and Anthropic survive. The hyperscalers would be fine with a model where they make huge investments in infrastructure and you pay to access them per use/per hour. That is already their model for cloud compute and it is highly profitable, even though the vast majority of what people do with it (storage, VMs, etc.) is a commodity.

> The hyperscalers would be fine... their model for cloud compute... is highly profitable.

"fine" and "highly profitable" are doing a whole lot of heavy lifting here, actually masking the quantitative reality that these "high profits" are nowhere near the height required to pay back their debts and remain profitable enough to prevent a sharp drop of their stock prices - that kind of development is the opposite of "fine" as far as investors, ordinary people and the wider economy are conserned.

> Profit margin determines whether OpenAI and Anthropic survive. The hyperscalers would be fine.

That's not how the market works, if OAI or Anthro default, they'll bring down the whole market, it'll be 2008 on steroids. Assuming the fire can be contained to only two trees misses the reality of how dense the forest is and how hot and strong are the winds blowing towards it.

I meant that the current business model of the hyperscalers is highly profitable, and that model is selling compute that you could build yourself but you'd rather not to. If OpenAI or Anthropic default because people prefer open source models, they will still have compute for rent. The only scenario in which they are truly screwed is if demand for AI goes down.

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