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Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

On a purely technical level, maybe? But in terms of actual revenue, is there really any chance of anyone catching the big labs?

Obviously, this is only a valid question if you don't believe that open weights are about to eat their lunch and their revenue is about to collapse, or they're running a super unprofitable ponzi scheme propped up by investor money that's about to collapse like a house of cards. I don't find those positions credible at all though.

If you do, then this question isn't really for you, as I'm more interested in thoughts from those who think that OpenAI and Anthropic in particular are about to be the largest companies on earth in a couple years. Could anyone catch them at that point?

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> But in terms of actual revenue, is there really any chance of anyone catching the big labs?

I don't know about revenue, but I suspect multiple other labs are already beating OpenAI/Anthropic on profitability. Staying on the frontier is expensive, and it's hard to recoup those R&D costs when you have a bunch of other labs nipping at your heels.

If you concede the previous point, then the only way for OpenAI/Anthropic to keep growing long term is to swallow the whole economy (i.e. mass job replacemnt), and that's a bet I wouldn't take.

Maybe. I can't freaking wait for the IPO filings so we can finally put all this to rest. (haha, like that'll actually put it to rest on HN, but at least we'll have better data)

I think the actual plan is to swallow a good portion of the job market. It’s the only thing that makes sense and I hear VC podcast debates on which percentage of jobs justifies the market cap.

The big lab revenue may not be catchable, but im not sure it needs to be.

If they can carve out a niche of industrial and governmental partners who rely on them for sovereignty reasons, it may be enough.

I completely agree, I think AI is a vast ecosystem will all kinds of profitable niches and sub-markets.

It's an open question as to whether or not superintelligence will create a monopoly/duopoly. My opinion is that it will.

They are very unprofitable…? I don’t think that’s really in dispute. We haven’t yet seen a profitable frontier lab and model pricing remains fairly subsidized

No, because compute, not model ability, is the moat.

The second moat is convenience, which all the big labs make it (comparatively) easy to glide into their models.

I don’t know if convenient is a moat when it makes switching very easy

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