alt Hacker News> considering that Llama, the mother of all open-weight models, has led to anything but success for Meta.
This is also a strange way of framing it, though. Llama was released as a research project, it was never intended to create some vast ARR revenue stream or reframe the way people look at AI. If Meta wanted to exploit it for personal success then they had lots of opportunities to do so.
With OpenAI and Anthropic's profitability under question, it is up in the air whether or not America's stance towards AI will work. If they can't convince the world that they're a proper software business, then China's philosophy will win by-default.
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> it was never intended to create some vast ARR revenue stream or reframe the way people look at AI. If Meta wanted to exploit it for personal success then they had lots of opportunities to do so.
They release the base model as open source, everyone uses it. They make a paid version, no one uses it.
They make no money from the open source version, they get no social credit from it. Where is the benefit to having an open source model?
It seems to me that the US AI industry has bet the farm on the idea that AI will enhance AI itself, so any small advantage will magnify recursively into an unstoppable advantage. Therefore it is vital that they spend as much as is necessary to be the first to that small advantage.
At the moment, I can't say that I see this happening. It's hard to know whether it may happen in the future.
From what I see it seems like we're hitting the top of a sigmoid curve in the model's utility for coding assistants. Going from "it does 90% of the job" to "it does 94%" of the job is a legitimate improvement, but it's not a phase change, and it's probably not worth paying multiples more for. And coding assistants have turned out to be the killer app for AI; it still isn't really working out in a lot of the rest of the industries of the world.
At any moment, theoretically, someone could find some new way of making AIs that breaks this sigmoid and propels us into a new one. But that's not a great thing to bet the farm on.
I'm not sure I'd say "China" wins if this particular strand of American AI fails. Falling back to an open weights model and making money on the serving of the models wouldn't take all that much economic realignment for the US and would be the natural outcome of any sort of fire sale of current AI assets. However the devastating effect on the stock market if the market comes to the conclusion that this current round of AI can't be profitable without falling back to such an economic posture and some more years of people adjusting to it can hardly be overstated.