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points by cmiles8 3 days ago | 0 comments
Yes it is a newer business but doesn’t change the fact that models are trending towards a commodity. And that’s a huge problem for the business model on offer.
[–] 827a 3 days ago
I don't think the models being a commodity matters much. Consider: Email providers are a commodity. Cloud linux server hosting is a commodity. Checking accounts are a commodity. There's a lot of great businesses, trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities. DeepSeek v7 Pro might open source and be better than any Claude model (unlikely), but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode. They just aren't. The models really matter far, far less than the experience these companies build around the model, and both Anthropic and OpenAI are doing a decent job of making that experience reasonably sticky and compelling.
[–] atomicnumber3 3 days ago
"trillion dollar businesses, built on commodities"

Which ones? I'm looking at the list of companies with > $1T market cap and none of them have commoditized markets. Instead, they all have huge network effects (Apple), enormous legacy lockin (Broadcom), a religious monarchy (...), or are some of the only people on the planet who can do what they do (nvidia, tsmc).

Mind you, there's lots of _billion_ dollar businesses in commoditized or partially commoditized markets. But Anthropic as a billion dollar business is sunk.

[–] dzonga 3 days ago
religious monarchy - you mean musk & the muskites.
[–] nozzlegear 3 days ago
> DeepSeek v7 Pro might open source and be better than any Claude model (unlikely), but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode.

But they might spend them on American inference providers running DeepSeek v7 Pro with ZDR routed through OpenRouter. Or hell, they might just run it themselves like we're already seeing some enterprises do right now.

[–] 827a 2 days ago
They might, but I am skeptical of this idea. The story of the past fifteen years in enterprises has been pretty clear: Move things to the cloud, we don't want to manage data centers. There are notable exceptions, but by-and-large that's the trend, and I don't understand why people believe this will suddenly reverse in the era of AI. Running a GPU cluster is substantially harder and more expensive than any other cloud resource. These companies don't even want to run their own Microsoft Exchange servers anymore, and you think they'll want to run an NVL72?

To be clear, I don't like this trend, and I strongly believe most companies are better off owning as much of their technology stack as possible, working with partners to help maintain it rather than making themselves lesser by working with AWS/GCP/Azure; but it is the trend.

Something like Azure Foundry w/ ZDR is more likely. And yeah, its possible that Ant will find competition from those kinds of providers. But Ant will also find revenue from those providers, and its hard to say where things will land in the end.

[–] SkiFire13 3 days ago
> but JP Morgan and Eli Lilly are not going to go spend $500M on chinese AI tokens routed through OpenCode

And they likely won't be spending them on something without ZDR like Fable 5.

[–] Lalabadie 3 days ago
Right – they can't argue for acceleration factored in their own value, if it's a property of the whole surrounding market.

IMO, US AI providers are not leaders in efficiency anyway, they're still running the original ~2010 playbook that led to LLMs ("What if we took ML researchers' work, but funded it at 50M/yr instead of 250k/yr?").

They're currently arguing for the continuation of that approach: Scale funding first, and the rest will follow. It is high-risk and WeWork-like, by nature.

[–] gtirloni 3 days ago
It's high-risk in that it's proven to not work anymore. Scale isn't a differentiator or won't be in the short term.

Meanwhile, everyone else is working on making these models more useful through a ton of ecosystem around them.

I don't see how the frontier labs will have any control over that to deliver on what investors expect. As mentioned in another post here, if they could, they would already be spawning hundreds of companies to diversify their reach but they aren't, because this era of AI is awesome but still doesn't allow a few individuals to replace millions of others that easily (or efficiently).