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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

How do the valuations of foundation model companies compete with them being firmly open sourced by Facebook and DeepSeek? It seems likely that building these models will not produce hundreds of billions in value given China and Facebook are giving them away largely for free.

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Those valuations are built on an imaginary future the founders made investors believe.

The idea is: if we reach true AGI first, we are going to own ALL THE MONEY!

Which erroneously assumes that models can't be siphoned off/recreated, as deepseek proved possible and even reasonably doable. Which in turn fundamentally shows that both openai and anthropic very likely have basically no moat.

I can almost smell another AI winter arriving, once all those valuations meet reality.

I cant see a future where AGI exists and money in general isn't worthless within 6 months of it existing. Either it kills us all, or makes the creator so much money that it's essentially worthless because they're the only one with money, or creates a utopia where money isn't needed.

The laws of economics apply just as much to AI as they do to humans, if anything AI is an even better (more rational) homo economicus. Even if AI wiped out all humans, the AIs would still need a monetary system for trading among themselves.

Would they need to trade once they figure out how to generate energy for nearly free and thus obtain anything? Trading is for the resource limited.

Resources still need to be allocated. Even by the AI itself. At some point a group of neurons will “argue” for more resources, and then within that group a subgroup will, and so forth. Hence the paperclip maximizes…

AGI means smart like a human, it doesn't mean it invents new things only found in science fiction. It is unlikely the AI will generate infinite free energy.

winter won't come soon enough this time

Postgres and MySql are free but hasn't stopped Oracle from making tens of billions each year in database subscriptions.

IMO it's harder to move away from Oracle DB than from Open AI. The type of businesses that rely on Oracle DB have all the characteristics of a "tech kidnap victim". Huge DB-driven projects, old bad code with few tests, and a profit margin low enough to not be able to fund a migration to a different DB.

I think businesses that rely on new AI models are very different.

It's still way too early. Many AI labs will fold, fall behind, get bought out. In the end, it'll always end up with 1-2 big ones left standing and a few smaller ones fighting for scraps.

It's pretty disgraceful to DeepSeek saying Facebook and China.

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