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SilverBirchtoday at 9:18 AM1 replyview on HN

I think it's unquestionably right that these companies can't all win, and those that don't win are going to burn a lot of money for nothing. However there's kind of two directions this can go: Compute gets cheaper, in which case there's no monopoly it'll be easy for many companies to make good models and there won't be pricing power on serving a good model. The other case is compute gets cheaper but we keep using more and more of it, so it does likely become winner take all. The first scenario is good for the economy but likely bad for the returns on these AI stocks. The second is maybe bad for the economy and maybe not even good for the winner.

Take Google or Meta: Today Google makes a shit-tonne of money and to make that money they need to run some servers. The servers are extremely cheap relatively to the revenue they make running the business. This makes them a very attractive stock - the core of why SAAS looks great. Now let's assume the monopoly path. Google can win. I think they likely will win. But now they're going to spending... how many hundreds of billions constantly training new models? The cost of providing the service suddenly isn't small relative revenue they're getting. So even for them it looks awful for their valuation.


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JumpCrisscrosstoday at 10:25 AM

> these companies

I think the conclusion the market is rapidly and correctly reaching is we aren’t in an AI bubble, we’re in an OpenAI bubble.

Google, Amazon and Anthropic look likely to see ROI on their capital investments because they’ve made them halfway reluctantly. Microsoft is up in the air. Not sure what Meta is doing. And with the benefit of hindsight, OpenAI used capex as a marketing strategy with investors (while Sam Altman materially lied about his compensation and somehow looped Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, founder of The Information, into his racket).

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