Gary Marcus

But the underlying reason nobody's making profit is they're all doing the same thing.

If we all have the same toothpaste, nobody's going to pay that much for it.

You can't.

charge $100 for a tube of toothpaste if you have nine competitors building basically the same thing for less.

Well, and those two are actually basically the same, and they're basically the same as what... The same cognitive architecture.

Yeah, there's small differences, but they don't persist, right?

I mean, that's another thing that we have seen over the last few years.

I wrote this tweet, I think, in 2024, describing what I've said is going to be a new regime, where basically LLMs are going to run out of headroom.

Everybody's going to wind up building essentially the same thing.

There's going to be no moat between them.

And that's going to lead to price wars.

And it's going to lead to, you know, no huge difference between them.

And that's what we've seen is a lead that goes back and forth, right?

Somebody's ahead for a week and they pay like, you know, $100 billion or whatever.

The numbers aren't public, but, you know, or the $10 billion, I guess, would be more plausible in order to get that lead that lasts like three weeks.

Like, that's insane.

The example you just gave actually is a really nice illustration of it, right?

Which is they are dumb in the way that we can't count on them to follow instructions, right?

Let me put some nuance around the dumb.

I mean, they do some things that you might count as smart.