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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

It's all beginning to feel a bit like an arms race where you have to go at a breakneck pace or someone else is going to beat you, and winner takes all.

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But what if AI turns out to be a commodity? We're already replacing ChatGPT by Claude or Gemini, whenever we feel like it. Nobody has a moat. It seems the real moat is with hardware companies, or silicon fabs even.

The arms race is just to keep the investors coming, because they still believe that there is a market to corner.

If it’s a commodity then it’s even more competitive so the ability for companies to impose safety rules is even weaker.

Imagine if Ford had a monopoly on cars, they could unilaterally set an 85mph speed limit on all vehicles to improve safety. Or even a 56mph limit for environmental-ethical reasons.

Ford can’t do this in real life because customers would revolt at the company sacrificing their individual happiness for collective good.

Similarly GPT 3.5 could set whatever ethical rules it wanted because users didn’t have other options.

The Nissan GT-R in Japan is geo-limited to only being allowed to race on race tracks.

You mean the standard 180kph speed limiter (which is on all cars in Japan) is removed on the GT-R when it's on a track based on GPS. There's nothing stopping you from racing it up to 180kph on the street.

I think the winner will be who can keep operating at these losses without going bankrupt. Whoever can do that gets all the users, my bet is Google uses their capital to outlast OpenAI, Anthropic, and everyone else. Apple is just going to license the winner and since they're already making a deal with Google i guess they've made their bet.

There is a very high barrier to entry (capital) and its only going to increase, so doubtful there will be any more player then the ones we have. Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Google seem like they will be the big four. Only reason a late comer like xAI can compete is Elon had the resources to build a massive data centre and hire talent. They will share the spoils between them, maybe one will drop the ball though

> We're already replacing ChatGPT by Claude or Gemini

Maybe "we", but certainly not "I". Gemini Web is a huge piece of turd and shouldn't even be used in the same sentence as ChatGPT and Claude.

If you’re using the AI answers on the top of Google search results to judge Gemini, you’re as ignorant as the journalists and researchers using ChatGPT-3.5 to make sweeping statements about “LLMs can never [X]” when X is currently being done in production just fine. The search results page uses a tiny flash model (it has to, at the scale it’s being used at) and has nothing to do with the capabilities of Gemini 3 Pro.

I’ve actively used Gemini Pro for two months for personal use, and Gemini is the choice of LLM provider at work for more than a year.

I mean, the leaders of these companies and politicians have been framing it that way for a while, but if AGI isn't possible with LLMs (which I think is the case, and a lot of important scientists also think this), then it raises a question: arms race to WHAT exactly? Mass unemployment and wealth redistribution upwards? So AI can produce what humans previously did, but kinda worse, with a lot of supervision? I don't hate AI tech, I use it daily, but I'm seriously questioning where this is actually supposed to go on a societal level.

I think that’s why they are encouraging the mindset mentioned in your parent comment: it’s completely reversed the tech job market to have people thinking they have to accept whatever’s offered, allowing a reversal of the wages and benefits improvements which workers saw around the pandemic. It doesn’t even have to be truly caused by AI, just getting information workers to think they’re about to be replaced is worth billions to companies.

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