Allegedly Google, early in this craze:
“We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
semianalysis.com/…/google-we-have-no-moat-and-nei…
Ultimately the dotcom fantasy kind of panned out. A few tech companies have massive control over society now, with what is essentially cloud/internet business. They have a moat.
…But with the AI bubble, I think folks are underestimating how fast and low the “race to the bottom” is.
As random examples:
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Look at something like Nemotron 4B, which makes a lot of mundane ‘AI’ data processing people assumed to be big and power hungry (with these data centers) basically free: huggingface.co/jet-ai/Jet-Nemotron-4B
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Look at GLM 4.6. I can run it on my Ryzen/3090 desktop, for free, and for the first time, I feel like it’s beating Claude and Gemini in some stuff, at 7 tokens/sec.
And all this is accelerating. Alternate attention is catching on, bitnet is already proven and probably next.
In other words, AI as a “dumb tool” is rapidly approaching “basically free to run locally on your phone,” and you don’t need all these megacorp data centers for that. There’s no profit in it.
Triumph@fedia.io 1 day ago
They differ in one major way: the economy was straight booming in the late 90s, and not in just a "rich people passing more money around amongst themselves" way. That dot com boom did end with a bunch of startups going bust, but it was also part of the process of building the internet we have today. Lots of hardware, lots of cabling, lots of towers, lots of people employed in making, installing, configuring, maintaining. In the end, the dot com boom created something.
This "AI" thing is a lot more "pouring barrels of money into literal incinerators".