In addition to stuff like that they also handle it with rate limits, that message that Claude would throw almost all the time when they were like "demand is high so you have automatically switched to concise mode", making batch inference cheaper for API customers to convince them to use that instead of real time replies. The site erroring out during a period of high demand also works, prioritizing business customers during a rollout, the service degrading. It's not like any provider has a track record for effortlessly keeping responsiveness super high. Usually it's more the opposite.
People like it when an IPO pops. It's a good news story and it makes all the banks who participated happy. If it was priced perfectly it'd get reported as the stock was flat, if it's a bit underpriced then you get headlines as the hot new stock that's taking off
The bit about smaller facilities being exempted in the current proposals does seem like a genuine issue and a great way to end up with hundreds of unregulated inefficient small data centers exploiting loopholes and causing all sorts of issues.
There's also a chance that the primary photosynthesiizers on each happened to be purple for a while (purple earth) and the ancestors of plants absorbed red/blue and ignored green because they were getting leftovers. Also, even now, iirc the limiting step in oxygenic photosynthesis is by far rubisco's incorporation of CO2, so there's no immediately obvious fitness function that would be optimized by just increasing the efficiency of light harvesting.
That's calculating value against not having LLMs and current competitors. If they stopped improving but their competitors didn't, then the question would be the incremental cost of Claude (financial, adjusted for switching costs, etc) against the incremental advantage against the next best competitor that did continue improving. Lock in is going to be hard to accomplish around a product that has success defined by its generalizability and adaptability.
Basically, they can stop investing in research either when 1) the tech matures and everyone is out of ideas or 2) they have monopoly power from either market power or oracle style enterprise lock in or something. Otherwise they'll fall behind and you won't have any reason to pay for it anymore. Fun thing about "perfect" competition is that everyone competes their profits to zero
You can if you have Premium. If you start manually skipping forward, the UI gives you a ‘Jump ahead’ button that skips straight to the end of the segment (based on crowd-sourced data, it seems).
