But now even regulators are working for them - the more regulations are there, the harder it will be for late comers to join.
OpenAI's spending is mostly buying compute from other people. In other words, OpenAI's growth is paying for Microsoft's data centers. The only real asset OpenAI is building are their models. While they may be the best models available today it is unclear if that those any durable advantage since everyone in the industry is advancing very quickly, and it is unclear if they can really monetize effectively them without the infrastructure to run them.
Which Zuckerberg is doing his best to completely turn them into commodities.
By giving them out for free??
This sort of incentives are what makes unicorns possible.
Also, there are immense lobbying everywhere covertly, if you haven’t seen it, look at the prominent news media, AI is now akin to “productivity gain” and “innovation”, and “adapting AI or we fall behind” attitude.
Look at all the hammers falling on different industries about energy waste, climate change while AI’s usage of massive energy is presented as “innovation and next generation of work and productivity gains to be unlocked”.
The target for OAI(and AI wave in general) is normal people, not tech people. And when people say AI, you conveniently see OAI emerge from news, social media, your colleagues, your boss, your friends.
I mean it is a little.
Amazon didn't extend its losses while growing it's buisness. Yes it made losses (quite large ones for the time) but the underlying principle was pretty solid. They had a market that clearing going to be profitable, because the overheads were much less.
But openAI doesn't have that market. They offer something free that is comparable with the competitors. A paid for option that isn't much better than the free version, and isn't much different in capability from the competition.
Moreover, in order to remain competitive they need to spend _billions_.
Even if we ignore meta kneecaping them, anthorpic et al are yapping at their heels.
The market isn't actually that solid, there isnt anywhere enough cash to maintain the research spend.
And what it usually looks like in practice is that regulators will extend an open invite to "industry leaders" to chime in on the proposed regulation. During that process, the interest groups advocating on behalf of the "industry leaders" will utter statements that aim to shape the regulation in a way that is beneficial to the corporation being lobbied for.
The end goal is typically to land on a new bill that will
a) give the regulators new fodder for legislative resume, so they can show their voting constituency that they accomplished something and
b) are not too expensive for the "industry leaders" to comply with. During the regulatory process this will get shrouded in language along the lines of making sure that the regulation won't cost jobs etc. But, if all goes according to plan, the regulation will
c) be insanely expensive for new startups to comply with, thus ensuring that any negative consequences that are caused by the new bill will be "invisible" because they will largely apply to hypotheticals (new startups wanting to enter the market) and small players that aren't on anyone's radar
Market ideologues have both fought regulation and allowed the cozy situations encompassed by regulation capture (allowing the "revolving door" between industry and government based on "who else would know how to regulate? lol")