Johnny Lee

“ChatGPT fed his students easy answers, so he built an app to argue with them." @washingtonpost dug into Professor Dan Wang’s AI tool CAiSEY—CBS’s argument-driven antidote to the #AI models that have taken over campuses. It’s now being used by students across the country.

It has been clear to many of us, and now it’s becoming clear more tangibly, that AI models will commoditize to various degrees. This is of course a difficult business reality if your core business depends on exclusivity on intelligence. But commodity markets are not communism. They are the largest markets on earth. Oil, grain, steel, electricity, memory: trillions clear through them every year, priced by competition among thousands of suppliers. In economic terms, communism is one provider and no price. A commodity market is the precise inverse. The world that actually resembles central planning is the one Dean argues for: a set of protected incumbents, access gated by the state, agencies instructed to manufacture FUD until every regulated buyer, and transitively every tool maker upstream, backs away from cheaper competitors. Open weights don't deter capex. They move it. When the model layer commoditizes, spend shifts to inference, data, tooling, and applications, and builds far broader industrial infrastructure rather than concentrating capital in a handful of companies. Most of our digital infrastructure today, hyperscalers included, runs on open source. The businesses built atop it keep excellent margins and compound at extraordinary rates. Open-weights intelligence will likely rank among the most important economic accelerations in history. It won't be kind to every early incumbent, Linux wasn't kind to Sun Microsystems, but it will be very good for almost everyone else. I suspect OpenAI and Anthropic, given their positions, excellent products, resources and talent density, will be just fine. They will simply hold a little less pricing power. The security theater around Mythos continues to do damage. Of course, there is no evidence for the hysterical claims. The evidence is in fact so thin that proponents of AI's existential risks now openly recommend FUD as the strategy. That should be telling.

Another reset for our Codex and ChatGPT Work users. Actually hit 9M active users way earlier today, but then got distracted by the approximately millions of things the team is doing to keep the systems up and reliable. Should have that sweet 100% weekly usage limit back in a few minutes. Go be your productive self and close twitter. Shoo!

> "it is possible there are some hiccups soon" > ChatGPT is currently down

6/ Inference speed can itself make a model seem “smarter” and unlock new use cases!

As AI floods the classroom, some professors are rebuilding their assignments from the ground up.

Seems to suggest that if it stops being the case that there's 3 labs which are all roughly equally good, competing each others margins away, the provider of the best model could probably get away with charging *a lot* more than they currently are.