When Xi Jinping did the announcement of their open weights push, they might as well cancelled their IPOs....
I close-out all my positions by end-of-trading everyday… so when the day came when there was a very clear and very scary indicator during early trading hours, quickly followed by SpaceX’s catastrophic fall right after opening bell, that was the end of my involvement….
And I fully expect oAI and anthro to be the same way. They’re being propped up with private loans, subsidies, and other tricky bookkeeping techniques. You would think their CEOs would pivot away from their current public personas. Ironically, they are like a poor man’s Elon Musk… and that doesn’t bode well for their companies
Second, humongous models are impractical even for them to deploy widely. They’re best used as teachers for smaller, more efficient models that can crank out the volume they need to sell.
Finally, there is a data wall. Sure, they can keep scaling RL on math problems and code. But with everything else, where will the supervision come from when they need several orders of magnitude more?
That's assuming the infrastructure needed to develop models stays available financially and supply wise. A lot of the services used to train and develop models are supplied and funded by people who are looking for multiple returns of investment. If/when OpenAI and Anthropic valuations fall and they inevitably get acquired, will Meta/Alphabet/Microsoft still want to spend lots of money for unclear returns in the short-term? Nvidia and co are on a one way train service to hype town. I don't think they will be happy to get on a coach to hype town Temu version. The shareholders likely won't.
Also, the backlash against LLMs is growing rapidly. AI content, data centres, etc is quickly gaining negative connotations outside of visual and music artists circles. While existing models are going nowhere, developing more advanced models is very quickly getting unpopular. LLMs Data centres increasing people's bills, Anthropic destroying old books, chat bots giving unethical advice to vulnerable people, etc. It won't be long before LLM infrastructure becoming an electoral issue.
Will a small research oriented community be big enough justify maintaining the apparatus needed to produce infra tech at a profitable level post OpenAI?