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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

I remember when AI labs coordinated so they didn't push major announcements on the same day to avoid cannibalizing each other. Now we have AI labs pushing major announcements within 30 minutes.

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The labs have fully embraced the cutthroat competition, the arms race has fully shed the civilized facade of beneficient mutual cooperation.

Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics will happen - I think Demis isn't savvy in this domain, but might end up stomping out the competition on pure performance.

Elon, Sam, and Dario know how to fight ugly and do the nasty political boardroom crap. 26 is gonna be a very dramatic year, lots of cinematic potential for the eventual AI biopics.

>civilized facade of mutual cooperation

>Dirty tricks and underhanded tactics

As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.

The consumers are getting huge wins.

Model costs continue to collapse while capability improves.

Competition is fantastic.

> The consumers are getting huge wins.

However, the investors currently subsidizing those wins to below cost may be getting huge losses.

Yes, but that's the nature of the game, and they know it.

> Model costs continue to collapse

And yet RAM prices are still sky high. Game consoles are getting more expensive, not cheaper, as a result. When will competition benefit those consumers? Or consumers of desktop RAM?

The free market has simply decided these consumers are not as relevant as the others.

Maybe the free market is wrong.

It can’t be. Those uses are suboptimal, hence the users aren’t willing to pay the new prices.

Not really. Investors with hundreds of billions of dollars have decided it. The process by which capital has been allocated the way it has isn't some mathematically natural or optimal thing. Our market is far from free.

Saying "investors with hundreds of billions decided it" makes it sound like a few people just chose the outcome, when in reality prices and capital move because millions of consumers, companies, workers, and smaller investors keep making choices every day. Big investors only make money if their decisions match what people actually want; they can't just command success. If they guess wrong, others profit by allocating money better, so having influence isn't the same as having control.

The system isn't mathematically perfect, but that doesn't make it arbitrary. It works through an evolutionary process: bad bets lose money, better ones gain more resources.

Any claim that the outcome is suboptimal only really means something if the claimant can point to a specific alternative that would reliably do better under the same conditions. Otherwise critics are mostly just expressing personal frustration with the outcome.

> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.

The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.

Sure, it can be beneficial. But don't forget that externalities are a thing.

in the short term maybe, in the long term it depends how many winners you have. If only two, the market will be a duopoly. Customers will get better AI but will have zero power over the way the AI is produced or consumed (i.e. cO2 emission, ethics, etc will be burnt)

> how many winners ... duopoly

There aren't any insurmountable large moats, plenty of open weight models that perform close enough.

> CO₂ emissions

Different industry that could also benefit from more competition ? Clean(er) energy is not even more expensive than dirty sources on pure $/kWh, we still do need dirty sources for workloads like base demand, peakers etc that the cheap clean sources cannot service today.

Yes, but not cutthroat competition that implies unsustainable, detrimental competition that kills off the industry.

demis is more than qualified. he was politically savvy enough to stay in control of deepmind when it was acquired by google, thats up there with the altman fiasco a year or two ago.

They're also coordinating around Chinese New Year to compete with new releases of the major open/local models.

Year of the Pelican!

simonw?

This goes way back. When OpenAI launched GPT-4 in 2023, both Anthropic and Google lined up counter launches (Claude and Magic Wand) right before OpenAI's standard 10am launch time.

The thrill of competition

Wouldn't that be illegal ? i.e. cartel to collude like that ?

You were downvoted but I don't understand why. This is the purpose/spirit of antitrust law [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

I have long since given up trying to understand voting patterns in HN :)

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Sadly it was the core of anti-trust law, since 1970s things have changed.

The predominant view today (i.e. Chicago School view) in both judiciary and executive are influenced by Justice Bork's ideas that consumer benefit being the deciding factor over company's actions.

Consumer benefits becomes opinions of projections by either side of a case about the future, whereas company actions like collusion, pricing fixing or M&A are hard facts with strong evidence. Today it is all vibes on how the courts (or executive) feel .

So now we have Government sanctioned cartels like in Aviation Alliances [1] that is basically based on convoluted catch-22-esque reasoning because it favors strategic goals even though it would be a violation of the letter/spirit of the law.

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/office-policy/aviation-policy...

AI commoditized to the point where Nash Equilibrium and 35 minutes between announcements matter :)

I wish they’d just stop pretending to care about safety, other than a few researchers at the top they care about safety only as long as they aren’t losing ground to the competition. Game theory guarantees the AI labs will do what it takes to ensure survival. Only regulation can enforce the limits, self policing won’t work when money is involved.

As long as China continues to blitz forward, regulation is a direct path to losing.

You mean all paths are direct paths to losing.

Define "losing."

Europe is prematurely regarded as having lost the AI race. And yet a large portion of Europe live higher quality lives compared to their American counterparts, live longer, and don't have to worry about an elected orange unleashing brutality on them.

If the world is built on AI infrastructure (models, compute, etc.) that is controlled by the CCP then the west has effectively lost.

This may lead to better life outcomes, but if the west doesn't control the whole stack then they have lost their sovereignty.

This is already playing out today as Europe is dependent on the US for critical tech infrastructure (cloud, mail, messaging, social media, AI, etc). There's no home grown European alternatives because Europe has failed to create an economic environment to assure its technical sovereignty.

Europe has already lost the tech race - their cloud systems that their entire welfare states rely upon are all hosted on servers hosted by American private companies, which can turn them off with a flick of a switch if and when needed.

When the welfare state, enabled by technology, falls apart, it won't take long for European society to fall apart. Except France maybe.

welfare state enabled by cloud services/technology?

I'm not sure if you know less about europe or tech.

> Except France maybe.

sure

The last thing I would want is for excessively neurotic bureaucrats to interfere with all the mind-blowing progress we've had in the last couple of years with LLM technology.

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