Gary Marcus

Wait, what? Are you listening to what you are writing @GavinSBaker?   If there are going to be ZERO profits at the model layer, as in your hypothetical, why would anyone value the providers at $2 trillion?   In fact, why would anyone hand them a dime?  If people realize that zero profits is a real possibility and cut them, off the providers will no longer be in a position to spend a trillions dollars on compute to begin with. Of course that would hurt infrastructure plays. Your verbal gymnastics won’t change that.   Also, Individual companies running open source, per your example, are unlikely make up for the lost demand from the frontier labs if they go bust. (Open AI and Anthropic account for a huge hunk of current demand and the backlog of business, as I am sure you know). It’s just not clear that the compute providers could survive if the two frontier labs ran out of cash. (Remember what happened to Exodus Communications? Most people will have never heard of them but they were the largest webhosting company going into the dotcom bubble. And then … poof!) And of course survey after survey shows corporate users are not finding ROI from the product and Gen AI remains error prone and limited, so demand may not reach the heights you are imagining. Finally, you attribute to me the idea of wanting AI to be dominated by a single player, which is pretty much the opposite of what I actually have been arguing nonstop for the last three years. That’s just plain careless.   To quote yourself, “This is all really basic stuff. You seem smart. Think for maybe 5-10 seconds before you post a reply.”