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I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.
by dabinat 4mo ago
I predict in future the best frontier models will be gatekept solely to the wealthy.
- echelon 4mo agoPay $1,000,000 per business function you want to build. Businesses will gladly pay it. Individuals will be locked out and unable to compete. Oracle will be able to "prompt a new smartphone" for $500M or whatever and enter the market to compete with Apple and Google. You and I can't afford that and won't be able to compete. Hyperscalers will hyper scale even faster. They'll port Linux to Rust, remove the GPL, and have all kinds of new entirely proprietary OSes. They'll be attested, signed, and gradually we'll lose open hardware. Thin clients with binary blobs, highly encrypted, no control, only leased to us. Within a generation nobody will be able to program or own devices that can program. That's the scary scenario.
- pmontra 4mo agoVery few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. But yeah, I got the gist of it. Incumbents like moats and happily pay money to build them. Note that the pricing of Anthropic's models usually increases for new models. Chinese models cost 10 or 100 times less. Are they less capable? Maybe, but they are alternatives unless credit card companies start banning payments to them.
- echelon 4mo ago> Very few businesses can pay 1M without blinking. None of my customers. Then they won't survive the termination boundary. Too bad. Should have had more cash.
- pmontra 4mo agoPeople have to eat food so they will keep doing business no matter what. If AI cost too much, they will do it without AI. Any resource that costs too much is replaced with cheaper alternatives. AI is no exception. At worst most of the IT business will die and we will make money doing something else.
- matheusmoreira 4mo agoThat's genuinely terrifying.
- LPisGood 4mo agoThen I guess I stop using computers that much outside of my job. It was fun while it lasted, but there’s other stuff. You don’t _have_ to buy into the technocracy, there’s a whole outside going on.
- yogthos 4mo agoNot if Chinese companies have anything to say about it.
- mensetmanusman 4mo agoChinese AI self censor or are banned from being released by their emperor.
- 8note 4mo agohow is that different from US AI that self censors and is banned from release by their emperors?
- girvo 4mo agoWell, it's different in that at least the Chinese companies release weights unlike the American ones!
- lbreakjai 4mo agoUS have guardrails, China have censorship. US have fair tax breaks to support the national champions, China have unfair State-backed monopolies. US have necessary intelligence gathering, China have state-surveillance.
- p_j_w 4mo agoI don’t need an AI to tell me about Tiananmen Square. I need it to do boring grunt work.
- swingboy 4mo agoI realize these models are locked up pretty tight and terabytes in size, but in a future like that, I don’t see them not being leaked via an insider. The weights have to be loaded into VRAM at some point.
- xpct 4mo agoThat would depend on what gets leaked, as I'm not so sure that the weights by themselves would be enough to replicate the architecture. I imagine some part of the secret sauce will remain in the architecture, and the tensor dimensions may not be enough to decode it. I'm sure if proprietary models continue to be a big thing, the methodology of their storage and loading on hardware will be obfuscated quite a bit.
- anonzzzies 4mo agoBut you can see this is not true (yet); competitors/Chinese labs are less than 6 months behind: either via leaks or by just stumbling on the same improvements with time/effort.
- maccard 4mo agoWhat chinese labs are on par with GPT-5.3 and Sonnet 4.6 that I can go and use today? (granted they're 4 months ago, not 6 but nothing was released in Dec/Jan so I rounded up).
- anonzzzies 4mo agoI use GLM a lot; for what I do (coding), it is Sonnet quality; I did not try the newest 5.2 yet to compare to Opus (some people are hinting). Older Sonnet/Opus , not SOTA but that already worked fine for me.
- chatmasta 4mo agoIt’s a pretty safe bet that every frontier lab has multiple foreign intelligence agencies running assets inside of it.
- greenavocado 4mo agoI'm praying that China survives this BS and remains the bastion of AI model openness and freedom of choice. Can't believe I just wrote that.
- hutubutu 4mo ago[dead]
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoChina’s biggest models are closed
- verdverm 4mo agoThe biggest open models are also Chinese
- Smith42 4mo agoIt's always been this way ever since the first industrial revolution.
- bryzio 4mo agoReasoning? More customers = more revenue, there's negative financial incentive behind restricting TAM. In the same way the iPhone isn't restricted to only the wealthy, that would significantly reduce total goods sold and thereby revenue. In addition that creates lower economies of scale, lower network effects etc.
- neonstatic 4mo agoReasoning: the poster blames all evil in the world on "capitalism", "corporations", and "the rich". The aforementioned are conspiring to gatekeep us all from the obvious good of poor, communist anarchy.
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoI can very easily see a licensing requirement coming soon. Running a higher-grade AI will require a govt-issued license, which involves a six-month application process, explanations of why you need to run it, where it's going to be stored and who will have access to it, pretty much the same as non-USA countries deal with firearms.
- fireant 4mo agoIf the frontier models will take as much money to train as they do now, there is no way the wealthy are able to afford their training just for their own consumption. Financing of this whole thing rests on the models being available to companies and consumers who are willing to pay astronomical (compared to other software) sums for it.