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Comment by snek_case | Hacker News Reader

I think the pivot to profit over good has been happening for a long time. See Dario hyping and salivating over all programming jobs disappearing in N months. He doesn't care at all if it's true or not. In fact he's in a terrible position to even understand if this is possible or not (probably hasn't coded for 10+ years). He's just in the business of selling tokens.

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And worse, he (eventually) has to sell tokens above cost - which may have so much "baggage" (read: debt to pay Nvidia) that it'll be nearly impossible; or a new company will come to play with the latest and greatest hardware and undercut them.

Just how if Boeing was able to release a supersonic plane that was also twice as efficient tomorrow; it'd destroy any airline that was deep in debt for its current "now worthless" planes.

That's why open models are going to win in the long run.

I think the key question is “when”? In a highly competitive business environment, companies are going to naturally be attracted to the most capable model if it leads to a competitive advantage and the switching costs are low. This suggests that “open” (giving away inference despite ever-higher training costs) may not win for a very long time, if ever.

When frontier models plateau and efficiency increases sufficiently that it becomes a commodity like other cloud compute.

One driver of open models might be foreign actors. With the entire US economy being held up by AI, it's a crucial vulnerability for a capable foreign actor (guess who) to exploit if they wanted to.

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