Indeed, and with the technology plateau-ing, being 6-12 months late with less debt is just long term thinking.
Also, Europe being in the race is a big deal for consumers.
Being the best European AI company is also a multi billion business. Its not like China or the US respects GDPR. A lot of companies will choose the best European company.
>with the technology plateau-ing
People were claiming that since year 2022. Where's the plateau?
The pre-training plateau is real. Nearly all the improvements since then have been around fine tuning and reinforcement learning, which can only get you so far. Without continued scaling in the base models, the hope of AGI is dead. You cannot reach AGI without making the pre-training model itself a whole lot better, with more or better data, both of which are in short supply.
While I tend to agree, I wonder if synthetic data might be reaching a new high with concepts like Google's AlphaEvolve. It doesn't cover everything, but at least in verifiable concepts, I could see it produce more valuable training data. It's a little unclear to me where AGI will come from (LLMs? EBMs - @LeCun)? Something completely different?)
> with more or better data, both of which are in short supply
Hmmm. It's almost as if a company without a user data stream like OpenAI would be driven to release an end-user device for the sole purpose of capturing more training data...
There's frequent discussions about how sonnet-3.5 is in the same ballpark or even outperforms sonnet-3.7 and 4.0, for example.
Could it be that at least for the "lowest" fruits, most amazing things that can one can hope to obtain from scraping the whole web and throw it at some computation training was already achieved? Maybe AGI simply can not be obtained without some relevant additional probes sent in the wild to feed its learning loops?
If you can't see it you're blind.
LLMs haven't improved much. What's improved is the chat apps: switching between language model, vision, image and video generation and being able to search the internet is what has made them seem 100x more useful.
Run a single LLM without any tools... They're still pretty dumb.
Why would the debt matter when you have $60 billion in ad revenue and are generating $20 billion in op income? That's OpenAI 5-7 years from now, if they're able to maintain their position with consumers. Once they attach an ad product their margins will rapidly soar due to the comparatively low cost of the ad segment.
The technology is closer to a decade from seeing a plateau for the large general models. GPT o3 is significantly beyond o1 (much less 3.5 which was just Nov 2022). Claude 4 is significantly beyond 3.5. They're not subtle improvements. And most likely there will be a splintering of specialization that will see huge leaps outside the large general models. The radical leap in coding capabilities over the past 12-18 months is just an early example of how that will work, and it will affect every segment of human endeavour.
> Once they attach an ad product their margins will rapidly soar due to the comparatively low cost of the ad segment.
They're burning through computers and capital. No amount of advertising could cover the cost of training or even running these models. The massive subscription costs we've started seeing are just a small glimpse into the money they are burning through.
They will NOT make a profit using the current methods unless the models become at least 10 times more efficient than they are now. At which point can Europe adapt to the innovation without much cost.
It's an arms race to see who can burn the most money the fastest, while selling the result for as little as possible. When they need to start making money, it will all come crashing down.
You're describing Google Gemini on any Android phone, that's today, sans the ads.