This is just opinion, could be wrong, discussion is encouraged.
I think the way Anthropic and OpenAI are going, needing to rely ever more on hype and rushing towards IPO before the general populace understands the rouse that’s being played, I can see how they will play out in the years to come. Not mentioning the heat from China.
I thought until recently they would eventually die because the economic reality would simply catch up to them, but thinking of how Apple TV+ works to produce above average television shows at a massive loss to Apple, I think that this perhaps the only viable route ahead. These big giants might just buy up some of these LLM farms, once their real value becomes apparent in the market (before or after IPO) and be incorporated as a proprietary technology for that company. Apple could buy Anthropic for a few billion to provide agentic coding and significantly lower the barrier of entry to new programmers to develop apps for their platforms. The entire business idea by itself is a losing business, but integrated horizontally across their other business arms it could make some sense.
Similar things could happen between other players. What’s very clear is that LLM as a core technology has plateaued and to gain 1% more accuracy or performance at this point is beginning to require an order of magnitude increase in raw compute.
Curious what others think on how this road for these chatbot corps looks 2-3 years down the track.
Very fine points on being the smart follower, yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :) Even in the US cargo would come to a standstill without rail.
I think Apple in particular has a high chance of coming out on top once the dust settles. They can’t lose in a fight they didn’t partake in, and they happen to be building the perfect hardware for small scale models.
That’s because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no “wilderness to conquer.” That’s what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that’s because it’s already there. They wouldn’t build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn’t exactly in good shape.
You’d be surprised. AAR Freight Rail Facts & Figures, ATA Economics and Industry Data, BTS US Ton-Miles of Freight
Long story short: you’d need millions of extra trucks and truck drivers to replace all the long haul, rip out rail in pretty much any industrial nation comes to a grinding halt, which is why it’s often at the top of the list of military targets during wars.
Sorry, you accidentally ran into a train person :)
I don’t dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That’s unnecessary. I already think that.
Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don’t think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn’t thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that’s a counterfactual statement, it’s only an opinion.