第一部分:数学
1. 所有人,甚至包括谷歌,似乎都把人工智能当作某种赢家通吃的竞争,就像当年的网络搜索那样——谷歌占据了超过 90% 的市场份额。
2. 但所有人都在用几乎相同的数据构建本质上相同的技术方案,因此根本不存在护城河。
3. 如果没有护城河,就没有人能拿下 90% 的市场份额。
4. 既然没有明确的赢家,就没有人能收取垄断价格;相反,你只会看到价格战和商品化定价。
5. 这意味着,与在激烈竞争格局下所能获得的微薄利润相比,所有人最终都会付出过高的代价。
我是不是漏掉了什么?
第二部分:心理
如果人们没有注意到这些,短期内倒也无所谓。
但他们确实注意到了。不妨想想:
昨晚我在 X 上发布了上述内容——起因是谷歌居然在通过股权融资,这一消息令人瞠目——一夜之间就有超过 75 万人(而且还在增加)查看了这条推文。更重要的是,大多数人表示赞同,在那个圈子里这种情况极为罕见。
金融界对我这种怀疑态度的关注比以往多了很多。就在昨天,两期重要的(而且非常精彩的)播客节目刚刚上线:一期是我重返由知名人士史蒂夫·艾斯曼(电影《大空头》中由史蒂夫·卡瑞尔饰演的角色)主持的节目;另一期则是一场四人谈,参与者包括知名投资者乔治·诺布尔、经济学家朱莉·加兰,以及在 YouTube 圈内被称为 @nobodyspecial 的金融分析师/记者。两期播客的所有参与者都认同我的担忧,并且各自提出了尖锐的论点。加兰关于大语言模型行业永远无法实现商业可行性的剖析,清晰明了且令人信服。
我对“token 最大化”的批评也开始被广泛接受;似乎所有人都认为这股潮流已经结束了。而像 Anthropic 这样的公司正在终止其“无限畅吃”模式,这将让许多客户三思而后行。
还有更多报告陆续出炉,质疑企业客户的投入产出比。贝恩公司昨天的结论几乎完美契合了我一直引用的那句关于疯狂的经典定义(一遍又一遍地做同样的事,却期待不同的结果)。
这一切何时会崩塌很难说,但经济逻辑根本说不通,而且越来越多的人开始注意到这一点。
然而最令人不安的是,散户投资者和养老基金很可能在这场浪潮中受到利用。
Anthropic 和 OpenAI 也会遭遇同样的情况。所有这些让我在昨天做出了如下预测:
我真心希望我的判断是错的。但我对此表示怀疑。
最后,再引用一位经济学家的话,他得出了基本相同的结论;我把最后的发言权留给他:
这项技术强大但不可靠。它必须被限制在狭窄、受监督的应用场景中。推理的经济账非常苛刻。竞争环境拥挤不堪,开源模型和垂直整合的超大规模云厂商正在侵蚀任何独立实验室可能拥有的定价权。
Anthropic 或 OpenAI 要沿着怎样一条合理且明确的路径,才能成长为那种持久、高利润的特许经营企业,从而证明其私募融资轮所隐含的估值是合理的?
根本看不到这样的路径。
贵族更新
人工智能:历史上最大的资本错配
Part I: The Math
1. Everybody, even Google, seems to be treating AI as if it were some kind of winner take all competition like web search was, in which Google taking over 90%
2. But everybody is building essentially the same technical solution with essentially the same data, so there is no moat.
3. If there is no moat, nobody is going to take 90% of the market.
4. With no clear winners, nobody can charge monopoly prices; instead, you get price wars and commodity pricing.
5. Which means everybody will wind up overpaying compared to the modest profits they will be able to make in an intensely competitive regime.
Am I missing something?
Part II: The Psychology
None of that would matter in the near term if people weren’t noticing.
But they are. Consider:
When I posted the above last night on X, sparked by the jawdropping announcement that Google of all places was raising equity financing , over 750,000 (and counting) viewed the tweet overnight. And what’s more most people agreed, which in that crowd is very rare.
The financial world is taking a lot more notice of my skepticism than it used to. Just yesterday two significant (and excellent) podcasts with me just dropped, a return to the show hosted by the well-known Steve Eisman (played by Steve Carrell in The Big Short): and the other a four-hander with the well-known investor George Noble, the economist Julie Garran and the financial analyst/reporter who is known in the youtube world as @nobodyspecial. Everyone involved in both podcasts share my concerns, and had sharp arguments of their own to add. Garran’s distillation of why the LLM industry will never be commercially viable was crystal clear and compelling.
My critique of tokenmaxxing is getting picked up, too; everybody seems to think that trend is over. And companies like Anthropic are ending their all you can eat buffet, which will make many customers think twice.
Still more reports have coming out questioning the RoI for corporate customers. Bain’s conclusions yesterday almost perfectly the old definition of insanity that I keep quoting (doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results):
Timing when all this might fall apart is hard, but the economics don’t make sense, and more and more people are starting to notice.
What is most upsetting though, is how retail investors and retirement funds are likely to be taken advantage of in all of this.
Same will happen with Anthropic and OpenAI. All of which led me to this prediction yesterday:
I seriously hope that I am wrong about this. But I doubt it.
To close, here’s one more economist, reaching basically the same conclusions; I leave the last words with him:
The technology is powerful but unreliable. It must be boxed into narrow, supervised uses. The economics of inference are unforgiving. The competitive environment is crowded, with open models and vertically integrated hyperscalers eroding any pricing power that an independent lab might hope to have.
What is the plausible, well‑specified path by which Anthropic or OpenAI grow into the kind of durable, high‑margin franchises that would justify the valuations their private rounds have implied?
There is none visible.
The Noble Update
AI: The Biggest Capital Misallocation in History