Consider Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
It's still early days...
Eventually the frontier labs will try to cut out the middle man once these models prove themselves and start doing partnerships with big firms in the domains, so they can take a % of the profits in perpetuity rather than just taking a one time payment. For example, after Anthropic Galen, they'll do a partnership with Pfizer to generate Ozempic-Superjacked and take 20% royalties on global sales.
The people have a right to make and use whatever models they want, protected by the constitution. At a minimum, the models are described in research papers that are unquestionably protected speech. Skilled devs turn those into programs, also protected speech.
I don't see how.
Maybe you're somehow legally allowed to distribute and download the weights, but most of us can't run GLM 5.2 at home.
And.. now I feel the need to look again. Darn, there goes my afternoon
A DeepSeek instance running 24/7 in a cloud provider will beat doing that with Claude which could bankrupt you with 100x more costs, even though it might find more.
And DeepSeek may find enough to keep your engineering team saturated and busy fixing things.
> but they do have the power to constrain commerce
This is a delusional take. Sorry, but anyone claiming this hasn't used Fable and compared it to the current best open source models. I see a lot of hype posting about GLM5.2. I see absolutely ZERO people using it in production compared to GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8.
You are way too deep in the HN bubble.
Having growth up in the 90s, it is weird seeing companies share their technology secrets publicly.
And it does, nowadays, give you a bit of a veneer of mere curiosity when you're being accused of massive theft.
But next year we could be in the middle of a massive $600B/yr capital-spending bubble deflating hard with unemployment accelerating towards 10% (or higher).
The internet never failed, but the telcom/dotcom collapse still happened in 2001.
The only moat OpenAI and Anthropic have is regulation. If the Chinese really eant to hammer us, they could realse the full training data and pipeline.
The big push for regulation and export controls is only going to ensure OpenAI & Anthropic are more like the automakers. Only in business because of protectionism, left to screw over US consumers meanwhile the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap EVs
That is to say, I believe free markets can exist along side government policy.
But we can still protect domestic workers without screwing over consumers. Pure protectionism doesn't work, it'll only set us back and keep us behind. Just slapping on 100% tariffs or a complete import ban just lets domestic companies get lazy. The protectionism needs an expiry date so they can't hide behind it forever. We could also work to move supply chains out of adversarial nations and into friendly ones, but you know...that requires us to continue to have friends and allies.
A fully free market has been an illusion in the US for a very long time. We'd do well to do some of our own state-industrial planning.
Frontier models may eventually achieve super-intelligence (no opinion beyond mild skepticism) but super-intelligence isn't necessary for most practical day-to-day programming. The problems, as always, become communication, understanding what users really need, etc. that is, softer skills.
I find it hard to imagine it would ever be cost efficient vs hosted/cloud i.e. you should always be able to run faster and/or better models remotely at a comparable price since its just way more efficient due to batching
I think you forgot what super-intelligence means…
Otherwise I don't see the comparison.
If I'm intelligent enough to use a tool, but I don't have the tool, that doesn't mean anyone who does have the tool is automatically more intelligent than me.
Likewise, comparing my performance without the tool against someone's performance with the tool wouldn't be benchmarking their performance, only benchmarking them with the tool's performance. The fairer comparison would be against me also with the tool.
If you think search ads are annoying, pre-roll YouTube ads are annoying, streaming ads are annoying, or basically ads-on-any-screen-anywhere-at-any-time are annoying, just wait until every stupid thing is powered by AI and is subtly trying to manipulate you to buy/watch/believe some crap all the time.
Yes they can do ads, but if they try to be subtle they will likely (eventually) be hit with fines.
Though, do the current rules apply to AI? Likely unclear. But if this becomes a problem I would expect new consumer protection regulation to be introduced aimed at this specific issue.
There is going to be a point soon where HN is just ai models posting ai articles to be filled with ai comments and for what reason exactly? I guess to try and train new ai slop company products into the datasets of various ai models to capture the budget spend of some ai middle manager model.
The gist of it as I understand it is in a society where things are fake and incredibly extractive (where a select few, bourgeoisie or rich prioritize their interests over others like we see accelerating today) they limit the forums available for people to question them and peddle their interests on the select few that remain. If you sufficiently isolate the people, it's hard for them to tell whats real and eventually they come to accept the fake narratives as truth.
In an odd way, this sort of fits in with the theories about winners writing history, and all those weird, sort of conspiracy-laden accounts of human history having these odd unexplainable gaps or stories around it. I don't know about you, I think we are simply seeing those forces of the past working at preserving their interests and using the latest technology to do it.
The companies that did not yet jump on this bandwagon and are still evaluating will have a decision to make.
No matter what the AI companies are going to change their pricing strategy and it’s going to become a lot lot more expensive to use. I am just hoping the price stays like this until I am done with my big chunk of work
That is worth a small multiple of the fully-loaded employee cost. So AI might be easily worth more than $200 per human-equivalent hour. With high utilization, that might be $8000-10000 a month.
With that kind of spend, AI provider financials looks less frightening.
On the other hand, there's two AI labs, that could afford to eat your profit, because what are you gonna do? They're your entire labour force.
What makes AI so convenient is how good it is at doing red-team code reviews on my work. I used to need all this unnecessary communication just to get a review, but now I only have to reach out to the people I actually want to talk to.