Rumor mill suggests that Anthropic might be profitable (but at what magnitude), OpenAI is not profitable, Google is mostly vertically integrated and has a low cost structure as they are have pre-existing data center buildouts, their own silicon and experience that suggests they will be able to operate at a very low cost, but they still have to justify their spend.
I think having to report numbers publically on a quarterly basis will bring the whole thing into reality.
One can hope that reality intrudes before the bubble gets even more dangerously inflated, but how many years has Tesla had a ridiculous P/E ratio. Even after growth stagnated and market leadership was lost in Asia and Europe. Number still goes up.
Outside of China, Tesla's probably the only company that can compete on battery prices. I don't know how accurate it was, but a news report was comparing the cost the manufacturer's pay to build the battery. Chinese companies were around $6000. Tesla was at $7000. Everyone else was around $12-15K. This is why a number of companies have exited the EV market - they just can't compete. This is why Ford lost money on every EV, despite the high MSRP. This is why the Ford CEO says "We're f####d" when he saw Chinese cars.
The only hope regular Japanese/American/European auto manufacturers have is if EVs do not gain substantial market share.
If the future is EVs, Tesla is the only non-Chinese company that has a chance.
It's depressing.
That sounds less likely than the bull case Tesla is trying to make on "we're a robotics company now" or "one day all cars will be autonomous taxis controlled by us".
This just means short sellers might have a hard time sinking a hype-category stock with reasoned research because the irrationality keeps it afloat.
For example, I just hooked Claude desktop up to my outlook to build a report for my timesheet then I used the chrome extension to fill it out automatically with that data. It could read Jira tickets if that’s where the information was.
A local model can’t do that for me because I have to get the rest of the integration software somewhere.
I also think this is why OpenAI is the worst positioned of the group of AI giants. Anthropic is trying to make a productivity operating system, while ChatGPT is basically just a website until recently.
All of that is done with two API keys and no AI. A local agent could easily put it together for you.
Now sure, I had to put this together and I lose the AI summary you have plus the auto filling, but what I'm trying to say is that I have 80% of this without any AI.
I also have a script parsing git from my emails and a little tui that translates them into git diff and a key binding to pull the PR but I find it a little cumbersome and don't really use it, and trying to parse todo from maildir is also a little useless so I accept that AI would be better there.
I also accept that your example is just one prompt of a dozen and I have to plan the solution for every one of your prompts, but I also don't find prompting to be terribly useful for occasions where I don't think the solution through- because it probably means I don't know what I want or don't really need it.
What I do find it really useful for is digging through Kubernetes and asking how two services are connected. Claude is better than local for that but there's nothing inherently non-local about that usage.
It's kind of paradoxical in a way. By making writing software cheap, they've made it much harder to create a moat for themselves that involves only software. It'll be interesting to see how they respond.
They won't need to do that if the new rules come into effect.
That is a good reason that all companies (over a certain size, say in terms of gross expenditures) should have to report such numbers. There's no reason that huge companies should be able to distort the economy while not having to report anything just because they're not publicly traded.
