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Comment by famouswaffles | Hacker News Reader

>The difference now is that they've hit the "good enough" point.

In some aspects sure, but in others no. Open AI's goal is to build "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." and Astra was a big jump in that. There still isn't a better model for computer use and vision/spatial work. Driving, Operating Robots, Video Editing, 3D modelling, graphics are all things Astra was >>> at than any other model. I'm sure you don't care about any of that so it's easy enough to slip by you but this analogy - "Now we've added a 4th and 5th axis, which is great for the 2% of parts that need that functionality." is dead wrong.

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Right, that's exactly my point though. Those are absolutely valuable use cases. But are they useful enough to justify a trillion dollar valuation? Or is most of the economic value in the stuff that already exists, and can be performed nearly as well by qwen/deepseek/kimi/GLM/etc?

And beyond that - how long until those individual Astra capabilities are distilled into separate Qwen-27b size models, with harnesses and scaffolds specifically designed to support that functionality?

>Right, that's exactly my point though. Those are absolutely valuable use cases. But are they useful enough to justify a trillion dollar valuation?

Replacing white collar work would be worth dozens of trillions of dollars at minimum. Software is not the only valuable job that can be done on a computer.

OpenAI and Anthropic already have what it takes right now to become trillion dollar companies even if the above doesn't materialize.

Chatgpt is used by a billion people every week. Their ads program hit $1B Annual Revenue Run Rate in 200 days. And Anthropic is growing so fast they're on pace to hit $100B in Annual Revenue.

>And beyond that - how long until those individual Astra capabilities are distilled into separate Qwen-27b size models, with harnesses and scaffolds specifically designed to support that functionality?

How long until...you could say that about the capabilities of past models but OpenAI still dwarf everyone else in consumer usage, and Anthropic and OpenAI are still growing enterprise usage heavily. In the end, neither the billion+ users of gpt or the enterprise customers are going to give a shit about what qwen does. And specialized models often perform worse than generalized ones.

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