> But in terms of actual revenue, is there really any chance of anyone catching the big labs?
replyI don't know about revenue, but I suspect multiple other labs are already beating OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability. Staying on the frontier is expensive, and it's hard to recoup those R&D costs when you have a bunch of other labs nipping at your heels.
If you concede the previous point, then the only way for OpenAI/Anthropic to keep growing long term is to swallow the whole economy (i.e. mass job replacemnt), and that's a bet I wouldn't take.
I think the actual plan is to swallow a good portion of the job market. It’s the only thing that makes sense and I hear VC podcast debates on which percentage of jobs justifies the market cap.
replyMaybe. I can't freaking wait for the IPO filings so we can finally put all this to rest. (haha, like that'll actually put it to rest on HN, but at least we'll have better data)
replyThe big lab revenue may not be catchable, but im not sure it needs to be.
replyIf they can carve out a niche of industrial and governmental partners who rely on them for sovereignty reasons, it may be enough.
I completely agree, I think AI is a vast ecosystem will all kinds of profitable niches and sub-markets.
replyIt's an open question as to whether or not superintelligence will create a monopoly/duopoly. My opinion is that it will.
replyThey are very unprofitable…? I don’t think that’s really in dispute. We haven’t yet seen a profitable frontier lab and model pricing remains fairly subsidized
replyNo, because compute, not model ability, is the moat.
replyThe second moat is convenience, which all the big labs make it (comparatively) easy to glide into their models.
I don’t know if convenient is a moat when it makes switching very easy
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