oblio

> Through what legal or financial mechanisms is this control?

Google, Amazon owns Anthropic shares. Microsoft owns OpenAI shares. Fairly sure some of the others also have Anthropic and OpenAI shares. And I mean large chunks, at least 5% up to 30%, I think.

I agree with the rest but I think hyperscalers will just get drastic haircuts.

I've never seen anyone exclude Facebook from the list. Facebook runs a huge cloud, just for its own use.

The real test is the creation rate for those projects.

From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.

* * *

[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.

Coreweave & co are neoclouds.

Hyperscalers are FAANG.

Your logic is backwards.

NVIDIA will take a huge hit and we will probably end up with anti circular financing laws.

Frontier labs are losing money and are most likely to go bankrupt and be absorded by bigger companies.

Hyperscalers will take a huge beating but they are ultimately profitable and they already control the frontier labs. So after a hard crash they will be fine. A lot of their debt is actually offloaded onto pension funds, insurance companies, etc. Those risk bankruptcy.

Plus hallucinations. Most "regular people" questions aren't inherently easy to verify. And when regular people do have to verify the answers, the value of "AI" drops like a rock.

Well, the US was the original banana republic.

For people that don't know, the American United Fruit Company basically leased US military units to topple governments in smaller countries and control production of bananas. Similar US companies did this to other smaller countries over other commodities. Many of these smaller countries were democracies, FYI.

Then the US had the gall to name the bullied countries "banana republics".

LOL, I appreciate the boundless optimism.

Or, get this - figuring out what customers really want and need is super hard and churning out code doesn't solve the truly hard problems of software development.

I don't see any indication that LLMs help with requirements gathering or user studies, especially live ones.

> That’s a decent chunk of money and CFOs are going to want to know what they’re getting for the money.

Finally! Gravity and sanity are starting to win.

Those special cases should be handled with overages and special approvals. Blanket approvals of massive spending doesn't make financial sense.

Fairly sure they tore those down last year or a bit before.

These days democracies are a lot fuzzier and there are lots of degrees, many named flawed democracies.

And the current president still needs to hand over the reins peacefully so I wouldn't declare victory, yet.

Besides all the other reasons, I have a strong feeling that Anthropic went to the Oracle School of License Enforcement and they seem like the type of company that would be willing to sue their customers into oblivion. Maybe not now, before the IPO, but afterwards, for sure.

The current administration was basically "corporations, do whatever you want as long as it doesn't interfere with our money making".

A lot of people felt, and there seems to be mounting proof, that the administration wasn't going to enforce a lot of laws, especially since their stance was to cut the agencies in charge of that (SEC, FTC, FCC, EPA, FDA, IRS, etc).

> Alternatively, what you’re seeing is continuous hill climbing and optimisations based on large scale experiments and simulated rollouts.

Let's be real. If their tools were as amazing as they're touting, Claude Code would be a tight, hyper optimized Rust/Zig/FreePascal/whatever 3MB binary that would launch instantly, have no trouble scrolling text at lightning speed on its 20 platforms, etc, etc.

Turns out, no. There's a Hemingway quote that greatly describes the current AI situation: never confuse movement for action.

> claude is a terminal-themed gui, not a tui.

It fits most definitions of a TUI, though. Just with lots of scrolling text.

Don't confuse TUI with CLI.

> 1. Lower resource consumption (ram, binary size)

Have you used Claude TUI? :-)

> 3. Often much easier to drive with automation software (agents/scripts)

TUIs? Not really. TUIs aren't composable, CLIs are. Now, many TUIs also have a separate CLI mode built-in, but guess what, many good GUIs also have a built-in CLI.

TUIs are also frequently harder to automate via click-click than decent GUIs, since mature GUI toolkits tend to have built-in accessibility and I doubt anyone has ever programmed extra accesibility into any TUI in history, outside of the default keyboard access they get because they're inherently character driven (though that can take you quite far).

Amusingly the biggest revolution of this tech wave will probably be the automatic if writing.

Because building a stable revenue base takes time. We've had many flash-in-a-pan type product but things which still make money 10 years later are rare.

That seems ironic. Does <<Big>>Table have limited table sizes?

If you think I've been on HN for more than a decade and I don't know what Android is, you're sorely mistaken. And if you think you somehow managed to reply to my comment with a "gotcha", you go digging into what Android really is made of and get back to me.

And regarding servers, who cares? The platforms users interact with are their clients and the actual server software on top of the Linux OS is closed source 99% of the time.

Don't post lazy comments.

> It's a waiting game. Open source always wins.

Based on... what? Thoughts and prayers? Feelings? Vibes?

I don't know if you looked around but open source is basically unusable for the largest platform in the world, mobile.

The next platform, whatever that is, will also be closed source (maybe VR, once it finally matures...).

LLMs are closed source, is there even 1 (ONE) LLM which is both open source and open weights and publishes its training data and methodology and is also remotely competitive with the frontier lab LLMs?

Consoles are closed source. Appliances are closed source. Embedded devices are closed source.

Even the web is basically closed source. Blobs of encrypted, obfuscated JS used to serve news pages (!).

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but closed source has won.

> But also every developer has a responsibility. At least not to promote any technology which is part of the problem.

Yeah, but money.

What do you mean? GPL licenses aren't truly free! They limit the right of corporations to abuse users! That can't be right! Better to use another license on the off chance you'll win the VC lottery.

They should talk to a orthopedist, in that case.

> That doesn’t require continent-scale anything.

Wha???

There are 13 companies in <<total>>, on the <<entire planet>>, that make more than that: https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-revenue/

Most of those needed decades to reach this point.

Anthropic has a near-clone in OpenAI (and vice versa). There are multiple smaller competitors, several much cheaper (especially the Chinese models).

Anthropic obviously needs continent-scale balance sheets, I would argue "multiple continent-scale balance sheets", since Google & co make their money by selling everywhere except for China.

Anthropic and OpenAI are never entering China on a massive scale. US relations with Europe are deteriorating and LLMs are <<massive> risks in an adversarial relation so it's not inconceivable Europe at some point starts marginalizing US tech companies, at least LLM labs. I imagine India will want to do something similar at some point.

Where exactly is Anthropic going to make all that steady revenue from, if it can't break out of coding and cybersecurity? Even worse, both those markets are super tech savvy so those cheap rivals are even more dangerous. One slip up the next 5+ years and Anthropic is history.

Ah, ok, so basically advanced pattern matching. I wonder if they train models on each other's weights?

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't training an LLM very well documented? Why wouldn't an LLM be able to read those docs just like it would read Java Spring docs?

> pubic-facing remote monitoring jollies

Those freezers seem to be having lots of fun :-)