I remain skeptical of Uber.
Sure, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic will make it work. It's not impossible. But it's far from guaranteed.
Uber generates about $1b in profit yearly now.
Openai can't claim either.
Uber was only on a path to monopoly in the US, not world wide. It’s lost to local competitors in most countries. And it can get disrupted by self driving cars soon.
OpenAI’s SOTA LLM training smells like a natural monopoly or duopoly to me. The cost to train the smartest models keep increasing. Most competitors will bow out as they do not have the revenue to keep competing. You can already see this with a few labs looking for a niche instead of competing head on with Anthropic and OpenAI.
Distilling might only be effective in the chat bot dominant era. We are about to move to an agents era.
Furthermore, I’m guessing distilling will get harder and harder. Claude Code leak shows some primitive anti distilling methods already. There’s research showing that models know when it’s being benchmarked. Who’s to say Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t able to detect when their models are being distilled?
Yes
>before making a profit.
No
The problem for OpenAI is that the cost of getting them where they are now has been to high and competitors can now establish themselves for much less money.
The dame Uber that lost close to 30 billion dollars over 10 years to subsidize its price dumping?
No, no we are not treating OpenAI differently than Uber