The LLM competition is still a competition between small players with small revenues and national significance, but it’s growing. I think it’s plausible that in a few years the competition around LLMs will reach the same kind of significance that the chip industry has (or bigger), with hundreds of billions in capital investment and sales per year, massive involvement of state actors, interest from militaries, etc. and may also go through similar dynamics (e.g. leading labs exploiting monopolistic positions without investing in the right things, massive spy campaigns, corporate deals to share technology, …).
The LLM industry is still a bunch of small players with grand ambitions, and looking at an industry that went from “a bunch of small players with grand ambitions” to “0.5%-1% of world GDP (and key element of the tech industry)” in a few decades can help inform intuitions about geopolitics and market dynamics (though there are a bunch of differences that mean it won’t be the same).
My bad, I should have said “a decade or two”, which I think is more plausible. I agree that the combination of “a few years” and a slow enough takeoff that things aren’t completely out of distribution is very unlikely.
Why is this a relevant analogy to ‘competition around LLMs’?
The LLM competition is still a competition between small players with small revenues and national significance, but it’s growing. I think it’s plausible that in a few years the competition around LLMs will reach the same kind of significance that the chip industry has (or bigger), with hundreds of billions in capital investment and sales per year, massive involvement of state actors, interest from militaries, etc. and may also go through similar dynamics (e.g. leading labs exploiting monopolistic positions without investing in the right things, massive spy campaigns, corporate deals to share technology, …).
The LLM industry is still a bunch of small players with grand ambitions, and looking at an industry that went from “a bunch of small players with grand ambitions” to “0.5%-1% of world GDP (and key element of the tech industry)” in a few decades can help inform intuitions about geopolitics and market dynamics (though there are a bunch of differences that mean it won’t be the same).
Why is this growth ‘in a few year’ plausible?
I still don’t see how this is a likely outcome.
My bad, I should have said “a decade or two”, which I think is more plausible. I agree that the combination of “a few years” and a slow enough takeoff that things aren’t completely out of distribution is very unlikely.