Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics will happen - I think Demis isn't savvy in this domain, but might end up stomping out the competition on pure performance.
Elon, Sam, and Dario know how to fight ugly and do the nasty political boardroom crap. 26 is gonna be a very dramatic year, lots of cinematic potential for the eventual AI biopics.
>Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics
As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.
The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.
Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves.
Competition is fantastic.
However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.
There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.
> cO2 emissions
Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources today on pure $/kwh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the usual cheap clean sources cannot service today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Europe is prematurely regarded as having lost the AI race. And yet a large portion of Europe live higher quality lives compared to their American counterparts, live longer, and don't have to worry about an elected orange unleashing brutality on them.
This may lead to better life outcomes, but if the west doesn't control the whole stack then they have lost their sovereignty.
This is already playing out today as Europe is dependent on the US for critical tech infrastructure (cloud, mail, messaging, social media, AI, etc). There's no home grown European alternatives because Europe has failed to create an economic environment to assure its technical sovereignty.
When the welfare state, enabled by technology, falls apart, it won't take long for European society to fall apart. Except France maybe.