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freakynit • yesterday at 2:31 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I have a little different take..

Top models, capable of discovering and inventing stuff, held back from public, and available only as for-rent research service (or whatever the relevant bureaucratic term is) to big corporations and government agencies like NASA, DARPA, NSF, NIST, DOE, etc. only.

I have a feeling that we, the public, will stop getting access to more intelligent models starting next year.. i mean, not the incremental ones, but, major ones.. like the one you got going from opus 5 to opus 5.5.


Replies

marsten • yesterday at 6:51 PM

The economics of that don't work out. Government is a small market and can't drive frontier innovation at the scale it's happening today, let alone in the future.

Look at the defense industry: The Big 5 contractors (Boeing, RTX, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman) capture most of the discretionary military budget, and the largest of them is in the $300B valuation range (Boeing, which has substantial non-government revenue). Fine businesses but nowhere near Anthropic's valuation.

Bottom line, the government doesn't have deep enough pockets.

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program_whiz • yesterday at 3:12 PM

this suffers from the same prisoner's dilemma we already see at play. Any player can defect and in theory capture a "trillion dollar market". Once they IPO, then their service is to maximize (short term) shareholder value. Saying "we reject all the billions in recurring subscription revenue because we are hoping all AI providers will do the same, therefore creating a moat" isn't going to go over well.

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jacquesm • yesterday at 2:36 PM

There is a good chance of that. This will incentivize the rest of the world. Keep in mind that the world is much larger than the USA, that the USA has alienated a lot of parties that were its allies and friends not that long ago and that there are far more talented people outside of the USA than in it. Silicon Valley had the world by the short and curlies and then Trump came along and pretty much burned it all down. It will take another decade to know how big the damage is but it is probably in the trillions of $ of lost income and that's before we get into intangibles.

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