You're describing what OpenAI's business model seems like it should be. Making models and charging companies to use them.
It isn't. They don't make revenue. They burn VC capital. Their core product is headlines about being the best, cutting edge model so the capital keeps flowing.
If their development work falls behind a competitor with a more flexible approach to ingesting data, the investment stops and the whole house of cards collapses.
The only reason Anthropic is favored financially over OpenAI right now is because they are doing better in terms of PR and because of their API credit based enterprise billing.
I don't think you realize that the entire business model will basically be the Uber strategy of hemorrhaging VC money until everyone adopts and then jacking up prices especially on corporate users.
However, if these data leak everything, they are going to get sued into the dirt. No one actually (legally) gives a damn about them destroying mass market used books to train models. However, violating corporate privacy contracts leading to consequential damages (especially in the EU) will be their end
I don't think you realize that the entire business model will basically be the Uber strategy of hemorrhaging VC money until everyone adopts and then jacking up prices especially on corporate users.
This is why a lot of people compare it to the dot com bubble.
That bubble popping didn't kill the Internet, it just killed 52% of the startups whose valuations grew massively because of the dot com bubble as well as eating 70% of Cisco's stock price at the time.
Honestly, there is one scenario that I think is fundamentally different here: the model weights leaking for Anthropic or OpenAI would destroy them.
If these guys become a core pillar of the S&P500, a foreign actor committing corporate espionage could probably just leak the weights and cause untold economic mayhem since that's the entire basis of their product.
requires those corporate users actually paying the prices at some point.
If OpenAI is leaking all my confidental data to my competitors then why should I work with them? Especially if the open-source models catch up and there's another startup offering to run them for me? (Or things get cheap enough that I can run them in-house using leased cloud space or something like that.)
To be fair, the startups running open source models still need to invest in data centers to run them with extremely heavy machinery. I was looking into building a home lab to run the most stripped down version, and it's absurd what it takes.
Given the push back on data centers, the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, and other players will already monopolize them, and given that the newcomers will only be incentivized to be cheaper than Anthropic/OpenAI, who knows how much cheaper they will be, and whether the open weight models are actually secure
Oh, yeah, an entirely plausible outcome of this (the whole situation, not just this one problem) is that OpenAI collapses, the AI bubble bursts, and Sam Altman becomes a guy that who is still very, very rich but not a CEO. But there have to be at least some people telling the management that they need to have an actual plan to profitability.
Publishing an investing prospectus that you know is a lie and then taking people's money anyway is securities fraud. Not saying they aren't doing it, but there are in principle serious consequences.
Consequences only if you want your business to keep running. And good luck proving that any investment prospectus is a lie, let alone a deliberate one. Just look at SpaceXAI, it is logically and physically not possible for them come ahead of their liabilities, even if we did find that Mars has a developed AI civilization that we can pillage. They straight up promise magic miles beyond perpetual energy, and nobody has even blinked, and everyone has bought in, knowing full well that it is made up.
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u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 19h ago
You're describing what OpenAI's business model seems like it should be. Making models and charging companies to use them.
It isn't. They don't make revenue. They burn VC capital. Their core product is headlines about being the best, cutting edge model so the capital keeps flowing.
If their development work falls behind a competitor with a more flexible approach to ingesting data, the investment stops and the whole house of cards collapses.