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Business Insider@businessinsider Scott Wilson knows what it is like to make a contrarian bet that pays off big. His early investment in SpaceX helped create a multi-billion dollar windfall for Washington University's endowment. Now he's making another one: The trillion-dollar AI labs are in major trouble. Wilson argues that OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to enormous spending just as cheaper Chinese models are catching up. It's a view that puts him squarely at odds with AI bulls like Vinod Khosla, who believes those massive infrastructure investments are precisely what will make the frontier labs hard to beat. "These trillion-dollar-plus frontier companies are not worth the liabilities that they signed up for," Wilson said. "There's going to be a ton of free alternatives." Read more about Wilson’s "unpopular opinion" regarding frontier labs at the link in our bio. Story by Ben Bergman (Credit: Getty Images; Tyler Le/Business Insider) #frontierlabs #SpaceX #OpenAI
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@ttt853988 Well, at least he got rich of it before killing a billion people
@christmanosu11 Altman biggest l o s e r on the planet
@christmanosu11 Hopefully they all go under
@manucastro9999 When you build and agent you can cherry pick which model is used for any given task, Chinese models work very well for most tasks, you can use the frontier models for the hard reasoning tasks only, that's why their financial projections are cooked
@poetsflorentino You know what the biggest issue with AI? It can’t be stopped or face punishment. It can’t face any type of policing, judgement, enforcement and faces no consequences or face any justice unto it. It was designed to win and survive at all costs. It is an autonomous nuclear hacking bomb just waiting to get out.
@mantra_mm American firms always over leverage 😢
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@techdecoded522 Endowments are a useful signal because they're long-term money. If they're cautious, it's about the math of burning billions on compute before the revenue catches up, not the tech.
@erskinevillain Not the circularly-invested, technocrat bubble? You don’t say 🙄
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@pmk76 🤡
@vega.glez Free alternatives there are a ton: glm, qwen, deepseek, mistral, etc, etc. But running those is not going to work unless you have the right hardware. And that’s what openAI and Anthropic have: huge data centers
@lavsolar.de It all comes down to one simple question: where is the money?! Where is the income to finance the expenditure of OpenAI or Anthropic? Where is the moat?
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@roy_amez The basic nature of AI is that it can develop itself, by that definition you would think that it will be free for all
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@machvee Are these frontier companies the new AOL and Yahoo back in 1999? Giant portals until technology advances render their investments as dial-up internet to walled gardens?