IMO LLMs will be equally transformative for online influence campaigns (aka ads + Cambridge analytica on steroids)
Oh and yeah, AI has already been shown to be more persuasive than the average human. It's only a matter of time before someone's paying to decide what it persuades you of
It better be, it's taken over 40000x the funding.
The question is not whether AI is useful, the question is whether it's useful enough relative to the capital expectations surrounding it. And those expectations are higher than anything the world has ever seen.
A single LLM provider might have been able to get great margins and capture a significant fraction of the total economic output of (currently e.g. junior grade software engineering), but collectively they're in an all-pay auction for the hardware to train models worth paying for, and at the same on questionable margins because they need to compete with each other on cost.
They can all go bankrupt, and leave behind only trained models that normal people won't be able to run for 5 years while consumer-grade stuff catches up. Or any single one of them might win, which may not be OpenAI. Any or all may get state subsidies (US, Chinese, European, whatever).
All kinds of outcomes are possible.
[1] https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...
Getting rid of frontier training will mean open source models will very quickly catch up. The great houses of AI need to continue training or die.
In any case, best of luck (not) to the first house to do so!
If the models stop being updated, consumer hardware catches up and we can all just run them locally in about 5 years (for PCs, 7-10 for phones), at which point who bothers paying for a hosted model?
This makes sense because Facebook was one year old in 2005 and OpenAI is 11 years old now. Eleven is just two ones so it’s basically the same thing as one so it is sensible to make that comparison