zlacker

> xAI needs money to win the AI race

Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.

Like what is the believed inflection point that changes us from the current situation (where all of the state-of-the-art models are roughly equal if you squint, and the open models are only like one release cycle behind) to one where someone achieves a clear advantage that won't be reproduced by everyone else in the "race" virtually immediately.

>>george+(OP)
They ultimately want to own everyone's business processes, is my guess. You can only jack up the subscription prices on coding models and chatbots by so much, as everyone has already noted... but if OpenAI runs your "smart" CRM and ERP flows, they can really tighten the screws.

>>Camper+81
If you have the greatest coding agent under your thumb, eventually you orient it toward eating everything else instead of letting everybody else use your agent to build software & make money. Go forward ten years, it's highly likely GPT, Gemini, maybe Claude - they'll have consumed a very large amount of the software ecosystem. Why should MS Office exist at all as a separate piece of software? The various pieces of Office will be trivial for the GPT (etc) of ten years out to fully recreate & maintain internally for OpenAI. There's no scenario where they don't do what the platforms always do: eat the ecosystem, anything they can. If a platform can consume a thing that touches it, it will.

Office? Dead. Box? Dead. DropBox? Dead. And so on. They'll move on anything that touches users (from productivity software to storage). You're not going to pay $20-$30 for GPT and then pay for DropBox too, OpenAI will just do an Amazon Prime maneuver and stack more onto what you get to try to kill everyone else.

Google of course has a huge lead on this move already with their various prominent apps.

>>george+(OP)
I _think_ the idea is that the first one to hit self improving AGI will, in a short period of time, pull _so_ far ahead that competition will quickly die out, no longer having any chance to compete economically.

At the same time, it'd give the country controlling it so much economic, political and military power that it becomes impossible to challenge.

I find that all to be a bit of a stretch, but I think that's roughly what people talking about "the AI race" have in mind.

>>george+(OP)
> Off on a tangent here but I'd love for anyone to seriously explain how they believe the "AI race" is economically winnable in any meaningful way.

Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world. So it is worth all the effort to be the first.

>>george+(OP)
Like any other mega-scaler, theyre just playing Money Chicken.

Everyone is spending crazy amounts of money in the hopes that the competition will tap out because they can't afford it anymore.

Then they can cool down on their spending and increase prices to a sustainable level because they have an effective monopoly.

>>theshr+D71
Money Chicken is the best term I've seen for this!

>>advent+Ub
Dropbox is actually a great example of why this isn't likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload workflows (including directly into software with massive install base) exists, and showed an active interest in competing with them. Still doing OK

Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the platform their financial models and all their clients rely on to a new upstart software suite

>>Exotic+oX
> Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world.

This may be what they are going for, but there are two effectively religious beliefs with this line of thinking, IMO.

The first is that LLMs lead to AGI.

The second is that even if the first did turn out to be true that they wouldn't all stumble into AGI at the same time, which given how relatively lockstep all of the models have been for the past couple of years seems far more likely to me than any single company having a breakthrough the others don't immediately reproduce.