> None of that means that the current companies will be profitable ... The future could easily be "Open-weight models are moderately useful for some niches, no-name cloud providers charge slightly higher than the cost of electricity to use them at low profit margins".
They just need to stay a bit ahead of the open source releases, which is basically the status quo. The leading AI firms have a lot of accumulated know-how wrt. building new models and training them, that the average "no-name cloud" vendor doesn't.
> They just need to stay a bit ahead of the open source releases, which is basically the status quo
No, OpenAI alone additionally need approximately $5B of additional cash each and every year.
I think Claude is useful. But if they charged enough money to be cashflow positive, it's not obvious enough people would think so. Let alone enough money to generate returns to their investors.
They just need to stay a bit ahead of the open source releases, which is basically the status quo. The leading AI firms have a lot of accumulated know-how wrt. building new models and training them, that the average "no-name cloud" vendor doesn't.