If progress with frontier models doesn't continue at the same pace then the investments and funny money deals might start to look very fragile.

If progress does continue then that progress might be towards smaller models more than quantum steps up in quality or capability that would increase the risk of the scenario above.

All of this is set against a backdrop of public hostility and political problems that I can only imagine increasing in the near term as well.

This feels like an unusually high stakes game of poker. I don't think I'd want to bet on Big AI right now if I had a few billion lying around. Then again - maybe that's why I don't have a few billion lying around!

For intelligence, I bet if inference got 90% more efficient they would just increase the “thinking” by 90%.

And thats just the inference side of things. For training, the big players like Anthropic would still be able to benefit from cheaper compute, by generating more RL rollouts, running more RL environments, and thus still providing frontier intelligence that would justify the markup.

Many customers cancelling would only be a risk if the compute expenditure was more decentralized. But its not

Then Elon goes to Memphis, buys a warehouse and fires up 30 jet turbines in the parking lot, and you start getting reports about the incessant noise and being able to smell it from 5 miles away.

It seems like there's a fundamental problem with realizing other people have agency and if you fuck them hard enough they will fight back.

Those vendors would very much like to retain as much of that business as possible. If the space goes sideways, I would very much expect some kind of renegotiation/work out.

They can access anything you can, whether there's an MCP/CLI/API or not. I create speciality bots for each 3rd party tool that I use at this point. The bots can talk to each other, have group chats. You can give them access to the machines that you're running the software on and give specific bots permission to do things on certain machine (like an Obsidian bot that writes logs of daily bot activity on a specific machine with a Dropbox folder shared). I've got a Security Scan bot that downloads anything that a bot wants to download to it's personal machine at SpaceX and runs a slew of security scanners before the other bots can work with it.

I got locked out of one machine while I was travelling and I asked Grok Bot on another machine if it could get into that one over SSH, so it sent me a temporary authorization link via Tailscale, connected to the machine and restarted the stuck process for me.

The usability is off the charts. It's really like having a team of people working for you. I've run a conference for the last few years and was getting completely overloaded. Now I have 14 bots specialized just for the conference helping me do it better than ever and participating in architectural discussions to build a system that help long term.

If you find yourself trying to juggle a lot in your life and work, it's a gift.

Google was profitable, free cash flow positive and had no debts basically

Anthropic is burning money by the millisecond, no profits, free cash flow negative and has lots of debts & commitments

Like is there going to be anybody, whatsoever, who's genuinely aiming to go long on Anthropic? It just feels like this massive collusion that 'everybody' is in on where we all know it's going to crater but the whole game is to pump it as much as possible and just try not to be the last guy holding the bag.

Obviously LLMs are going to revolutionize the world, and they arguably already have, but there are open weight models available for free with frontier level performance, and the price to run these models keeps plummeting which, in turn, is already driving token costs down. Like many things now a days, this is all highly entertaining, yet absolutely insane.