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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Another problem is that US models are all closed source, and if you're a large corporate you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic.

I genuinely don't understand what moat these US model labs have. If they're saying recursive self improvement is just around the corner and Chinese labs are only slightly behind the leading US models, what moat does the US labs have? Are the US models going to recursively self improve better than the Chinese open source ones or something?

I might be completely wrong about this, but if I had money in OpenAI or Anthropic I'd be pulling it all right now. I think the chance of them going to near-zero over the next few years is very significant.

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> you may not want your org to be held hostage by OpenAI / Anthropic

Or Google. I'm working with multiple customers right now that are very pissed at Google for deprecating Gemini 2.5 Flash, canning the GA release of 3.0 Flash and now have to decide whether to bite the bullet of the 5x price increase for 3.5 Flash or switching providers. Quite a few of them will likely fully pivot to open models.

I'd be curious if any of your customers have tried 3.1 Flash Lite. It's cheaper than 2.5 Flash, and in my experience with the free tier, quite an upgrade in terms of quality of response. My suspicion is that Google is killing off the old models because they aren't a good value for the customer or for themselves.

Most of them are using it for data extraction use-cases on complex where they are already in a tricky cost vs. quality compromise. Some of them have evaluated 3.1 Flash Lite but for all of them it performed worse than 2.5 Flash and below requirement.

The only ones I've seen switch to 3.1 Flash Lite were from 2.5 Flash Lite, and all for the most simple use cases, e.g. small UX enhancements.

Their moat is cash to pay politicians to regulate away competition.

maybe the moat is that we slowly start to forget how to code by hand and then you -need- the AI tool.

I think they are racing because the first ASI will 'win', preventing others, of course we won't be able to bake the right goals into it though.

i dont think its going to automatically prevent others. super claude might understand why diversity is important. if were talking sci fi scenarios the most likely one is probably overwatch (multiple independent ais with gray ethics and complicated relationships) more than skynet.

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