alt Hacker NewsAI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race.
I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
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> AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit.
That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.
> as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race
China is obviously in the GPU/RAM race. Heard of Huawei, Moore Threads, Lisuan Tech, CXMT?
I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)
Not to mention with each iteration of every model you get lower cost per token. It’s really a race to the bottom for hyperscalers and neoclouds at this point, with technically only two paying customers.
> The real value is and going to be in hardware
Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.
Yup. Model capabilities seem to keep converging quickly, not leaders breaking away for long.
Frontier labs are racing towards SaaS commoditization at incredible speed. And while there might possibly be $Trillions in productivity gained from their use, there's no reason to think those gains get captured by the model makers or inference providers at this point.
Maybe the Claude or ChatGPT desktop apps will dominate as the new MS Excel, but that's hard to do without already having locked the whole market into Windows.
There's virtually no platform play available to them.