Yes it's wild that OpenAI raised money at 1,000X earnings but the tech giants keep mountains of money on hand at all times for just these moments.
Right now it's a "jump ball" in just about all tech. LLM threaten all the big incumbents because AI is racing "across the chasm" much faster than most people expected. AI is a new baseline expectation for customers and Google doesn't appear ready for that. It's unlikely other big incumbents are ready either.
For many years we've been working on machine learning to enhance the productivity of our client's employees, now it's almost possible to just replace those employees. AI will do to white collar work what the assembly line did to blue collar work. The ethical implications of that should be considered by people smarter than me.
Now to be clear I'm not crazy! These architectures are not going to become self aware or anything, and this article while thoughtful spends a lot of words picking on C3... whose pitch as best I can tell is just short of a manic fever dream promising an all knowing general intelligence. That's a dead end, and yes like any gold rush a lot of money will be lost but a lot of money will be made as well.
I for one am glad to see the big boys scared, and I'm thankful I get to have another one of these disruptions happen during my career.
Once more unto the breach!