Viewed from historical perspective, big tech is really reaping the benefits of the intellectual wealth accumulated over many thousands of years by humanity collectively. This should be recognized to find a better path forward.
Open source models are available at highly competitive prices for anyone to use and are closing the gap to 6-8 months from frontier proprietary models.
There doesn't appear to be any moat.
This criticism seems very valid against advertising and social media, where strong network effects make dominant players ultra-wealthy and act like a tax, but the AI business looks terrible, and it appears that most benefits are going to accrue fairly broadly across the economy, not to a few tech titans.
NVIDIA is the one exception to that, since there is a big moat on their business, but not clear how long that will last either.
When the market shifts to a more compliance-relevant world, I think the Labs will have a monopoly on all of the research, ops, and production know-how required to deliver. That's not even considering if Agents truly take off (which will then place a premium on the servicing of those agents and agent environments rather than just the deployment).
There's a lot of assumptions in the above, and the timelines certainly vary, so its far from a sure thing - but the upside definitely seems there to me.
If Open Source can keep up from a pure performance standpoint, any one of these cloud providers should be able to provide it as a managed service and make money that way.
Then OpenAI, Anthropic, etc end up becoming product companies. The winner is who has the most addictive AI product, not who has the most advanced model.
What we can argue about is if AI is truly transforming lives of everyone, the answer is a no. There is a massive exaggeration of benefits. The value is not ZERO. It’s not 100. It’s somewhere in between.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-10/data-cent...
It doesn't matter if the AI is any good, you will still pay for it because it's the only way to access more compute power than consumer hardware offers.
What I predict is that we won't advance in memory technology on the consumer side as quickly. For instance, a huge number of basic consumer use cases would be totally fine on DDR3 for the next decade. Older equipment can produce this; so it has value, and we may see platforms come out with newer designs on older fabs.
Chiplets are a huge sign of growth in that direction - you end up with multiple components fabbed on different processes coming together inside one processor. That lets older equipment still have a long life and gives the final SoC assembler the ability to select from a wide range of components.
Think of all the scientific experiments we could've had with the hundreds of billions being spent on AI. We need a lot more data on what's happening in space, in the sea, in tiny bits of matter, inside the earth. We need billions of people to learn a lot more things and think hard based on those axioms and the data we could gather exploring what I mention above to discover new ones. I hypothesize that investing there would have more benefit than a bunch of companies buying server farms to predict text.
CERN cost about 6 billions. Total MIT operations cost 4.7 billions a year. We could be allocating capital a lot more efficiently.
What happens when the AI bubble is over and developers of open models doesn't want to incinerate money anymore? Foundation models aren't like curl or openssl. You can't have maintain it with a few engineer's free time.
Like after dot-com the leftovers were cheap - for a time - and became valuable (again) later.
Spending a million dollars on training and giving the model for free is far cheaper than hundreds of millions of dollars spent on inference every month and charging a few hundred thousand for it.
As an LLM I use whatever is free/cheapest. Why pay for ChatGPT if Copilot comes with my office subscription? It does the same thing. If not I use Deepseek or Qwen and get very similar results.
Yes if you're a developer on Claude Code et al I get a point. But that's few people. The mass market is just using chat LLMs and those are nothing but a commodity. It's like jumping from Siri to Alexa to whatever the Google thing is called. There are differences but they're too small to be meaningful for the average user
They are investing 10s of billions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CopyCatRecipes/comments/1qbbo6d/coc...
The recipe also isn't that much of a secret, they read it on the air on a This American Life episode and the Coca Cola spokesperson kind of shrugged it off because you'd have to clone an entire industrial process to turn that recipe into a recognizable Coke.
Do we not all stand on the shoulders of giants? Will "big next" not take up where "big tech" leaves off one day?
imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.
hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.
We could use another Roosevelt.
- big tech should pay for the data they extract and sell back to us
- startups should stop forcing ai features that no one wants down our throats
- the vanguard of ai should be open and accessible to all not locked in the cloud behind paywalls
It's just not a well thought out comment. If we focus on the "better path forward", the entrance to which is only unlocked by the realisation that big techs achievements (and thus, profits) belong to humanity collectively... After we reach this enlightened state, what does op believe the first couple of things a traveller on this path is likely to encounter (beyond Big Techs money, which incidentally we take loads of already in the form of taxes, just maybe not enough)?
First you have tech's ability to scale. The ability to scale also has it creep new changes/behaviors into every aspect of our lives faster than any 'engine for change' could previous.
Tech also inherits, so you can treat it as legos using, what are we at, definitely tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of human years of work, of building blocks to build on top of. Imagine if you started every house with a hundred thousand human years of labor already completed instantly. No other domain in human history accumulates tens of millions of skilled human years annually and allows so much of that work to stack, copy, and propagate at relatively low cost.
And tech's speed of iteration is insane. You can try something, measure it, change it, and redeploy in hours. Unprecedented experimentation on a mass scale leading to quicker evolution.
It's so disingenuous to have tech valuations as high as they are based on these differentiations but at the same time say 'tech is just like everything from the past and must not be treated differently, and it must be assumed outcomes from it are just like historical outcomes'. No it is a completely different beast, and the differences are becoming more pronounced as the above 10Xs over and over.
On that note they say oil is dead dinosaurs, maybe have a word with Saudi Arabia...