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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

According to your argument, OpenAI should simply stop R and D which can result in massive jumps in performance because China may catch up?

What is your prescription if I may ask? Don’t invest in research? Let China do it?

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There's no should, only what economics incentivize. Right now we're not paying for the upfront training costs-it's great, the Millennial subsidy continues. But if, and big if right now, the infinite money font dries up and they have to recoup training investment direct from customers then that looks to be a huge price increase on the ground which makes cheap to train and good enough even more attractive than it already is.

It's far too late for a prescription now because they're already committed to hundreds of billions in spending they don't have, but the reason Chinese companies will win the long game is because they are serious and the Americans are deeply unserious. From the beginning, Chinese labs have viewed LLMs as software tools and developed efficiently. Conversely, Americans are selling a fantasy about creating the machine god if they just throw another hundred billion at it every few months. Altman, Amodei, and Musk are all pathological liars who have oriented their entire companies around deceiving investors and marketing hype rather than engineering principles. They are unbelievably successful at what they set out to do, but what they set out to do was not to build a long-lasting foundation for success.

They successfully turned the entire tech sector into a giant pyramid scheme. That's one hell of an accomplishment. I hope history forever remembers the names of everyone who aided and abetted them.

Calling OpenAI and Anthropic a pyramid scheme is absurd

Why do you think so? To me it seems like they actually fit the textbook definition very well. They're firms that require constant injection of massive amounts of new capital to stay solvent, with no clear path towards profitability. The only way anyone gets their money back is if more investors buy in. It would be easy to prove me wrong, all they have to do is start turning a profit. But they can't.

[edit] And worse, they've dragged major established players in the industry with them--Microsoft, Google, etc. So now an uncomfortably large fraction of the world's economy is resting on.. nothing. To be fair, I don't blame OpenAI or Anthropic for the bad behavior of the other tech giants. It's the entire tech sector that has lost their minds collectively. At some point making things that actually work lost out to fantastic delusions.

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