AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data
I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did.
Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralization.
Centralized, scaled compute will always fill a purpose. But neither Microsoft, nor Facebook, nor OpenAI started out needing “Cloud Scale”.
The first one man unicorn startup will, I’m fairly certain, not be paying Anthropic per month or per token for the vast bulk of their matmul.
As someone who created and exited a successful AI startup in the past, I'll say it's actually quite different today. Even I don't have the funds to start a foundational model company, and I absolutely wouldn't before my exit either.
While I do believe there may be valid path forward with smaller models, there are still significant financial barriers to entry that didn't exist to the same extent in the past.
I’d bet the other way: You could have said exactly the same thing about computing 60 years ago, when IBM systems cost millions of dollars and filled whole rooms. And of course many people did.
Personal, commodity access to compute won, and won so thoroughly that it enabled this wave of scary compute centralization.
Centralized, scaled compute will always fill a purpose. But neither Microsoft, nor Facebook, nor OpenAI started out needing “Cloud Scale”.
The first one man unicorn startup will, I’m fairly certain, not be paying Anthropic per month or per token for the vast bulk of their matmul.