3 ms·

They’ll slow down not because they “are worried” but because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges.

kypro 13d ago
> because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges. I don't mean to be rude, but how is it even possible for someone to hold this opinion in mid-2026? Can you explain why you believe this?
- Zenul_Abidin 13d ago
  Basically, continuously building out compute is costing these labs enormous amounts of money, which VCs and other companies have been bankrolling in order for them to develop powerful models. So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
- tuvix 13d ago
  Why would someone hold the opposite opinion? It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever. The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
  - simianwords 13d ago
    Sorry, this is ridiculous. OpenAI said that they have a step change in model performance. They proved it by solving a Millenium problem. HF incidents are public and vetted. If you still think there's a stall despite all evidence pointing to opposite, I don't know what to say..
    - vrganj 13d ago
      What reason could OpenAI possibly have to lie about their own performance? The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research leading to the Millenium problem further hurts their case imo.
      - simianwords 13d ago
        they lied about their performance by.... solving a famously hard problem to solve? Edit: The "reputable academic" who accused OpenAI had to say this about LLMs and the recent result. source: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf > “the results are not the important thing.” > “the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month.” > “This is a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.” > “incredibly important developments.” > “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.” Clearly Buckmaster (who is probably one of the most accomplished academics in the field) himself doesn't believe that AI has stalled. What makes you think you are right?
        vrganj 13d ago
        Solving is a very interesting way of describing what happened. Unless you believe them over reputable academics I suppose? I will note the remarkable goal post shift in your edit - giving direct counter evidence to your own earlier claim of an OpenAI proof - and leave it at that.
        rieie 12d ago
        [dead]
        mac-attack 12d ago
        We are approaching what is likely the biggest existential crisis in human history. Unfortunately, there will be people that refuse to tackle the issue head on and will instead narrow their focus on data that suggests that tomorrow will be like today.
- johnnienaked 13d ago
  How can you not believe it? Neither of them are even close to making a profit and the market is saturated with cheaper alternatives. This is a ploy for regulatory capture.
  - Footnote7341 13d ago
    You're wrong about profits.
    - quikoa 13d ago
      Are you sure you don't mean revenue? Given the enormous investments profits seem very unlikely.
    - johnnienaked 13d ago
      Anthropic's profit estimate they released a while ago was a masterclass in deceptive reporting. They didn't include training costs, stock based compensation, or liabilities. Token gross margin is not profit.
    - Insanity 13d ago
      They haven’t posted a profit in any quarter, and even IPO dates are slipping. They have revenue, not profit.
- simianwords 13d ago
  [flagged]
  - ofjcihen 13d ago
    I mean, more simply (and with less vitriol) - AI has yet to be profitable for these large labs (also zero moat etc.) - There is considerable hype and people are tired of it. - HF incident (and apparently many others that these labs are not reporting on or don’t even know about) proves they have terrible security practices and that’s about it. - NS is incredibly suspicious timing wise. You are sprinting around these threads to misrepresent the average persons issues with AI. I don’t know why people having those issues seems to be taken as a personal attack for you.
- dumberquestions 13d ago
  I don't think the technical aspect is true, performance has been growing fairly consistently, but the financial aspect, or more accurately the logistical aspect, is plausible; with competition as fierce as it currently is, for how long can they keep growing at the same pace? People can't afford RAM anymore and datacenter build outs aren't particularly popular, OAI has been doubling compute capacity every 7 months for the past 3 years, it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long, something has to give. And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government. Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.
  - simianwords 13d ago
    I just find it strange how multiple people throw completely different arguments just to land on same conclusion. Your argument seems to mix a few arguments like: OpenAI has so much demand and it has made so much compute that it is a bad thing (?!). It can't go on (why?) hence the capabilities are stalling (how?). Then you also say that it is too competitive which is a totally different argument to compute. So in this thread we have multiple vectors of arguments like - high competition - high demand for compute (not sure how this hurts OpenAI but whatever) - capability has stalled
    - dumberquestions 13d ago
      I never mentioned capability stalling, my point is that if you extrapolate the same rate of growth just a few years into the future, you quickly reach logistical impracticality, I don't think It's hard to deduce that AI compute can't keep doubling every 6 months for long. The other part is that this is happening because the foundational model business is both extremely successful and competitive, if it wasn't as successful the market demand would've been saturated by now, and if it wasn't as competitive a single monopoly could've paced things more reasonably from the beginning.
    - webern777 12d ago
- freejazz 12d ago
  >Can you explain why you believe this? Well, as a starter, I've been told that AI will take my job for at least 3 years now. That's not happening. In fact, what's happening is that I now have an AI vendor BEGGING me to use their product, which of course, cannot do my job.
asdfman123 13d ago
Actually, one of the major challenges they'll face is getting enough electricity. That could stop AI growth in its tracks.
- darth_avocado 13d ago
  I think it’s more than money and slowing progress. Public perception on AI is in the gutter. That is a much bigger threat to these companies. They’re trying to turn it around.
  - batshit_beaver 13d ago
    Trying to turn it around by once again claiming that ai is an existential threat and will take everyone’s job right before brutally murdering every human. These companies don’t appear to give a single fuck about public perception. Only their investors and the government (in anticipation of the biggest bailout in human history).
  - asdfman123 13d ago
    Public perception is another big one. But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon. Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.
    - anjel 13d ago
      How did modernization get subsumed into scaling up. The us power grid has been outdated tech for decades
    - pianopatrick 13d ago
      Someone will likely come up with some clever way to make AI use less electricity. There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]

kypro 13d ago

> because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges. I don't mean to be rude, but how is it even possible for someone to hold this opinion in mid-2026? Can you explain why you believe this?

Zenul_Abidin 13d ago
Basically, continuously building out compute is costing these labs enormous amounts of money, which VCs and other companies have been bankrolling in order for them to develop powerful models. So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
tuvix 13d ago
Why would someone hold the opposite opinion? It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever. The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
- simianwords 13d ago
  Sorry, this is ridiculous. OpenAI said that they have a step change in model performance. They proved it by solving a Millenium problem. HF incidents are public and vetted. If you still think there's a stall despite all evidence pointing to opposite, I don't know what to say..
  - vrganj 13d ago
    What reason could OpenAI possibly have to lie about their own performance? The fact they were desperate enough for a PR win they stole the research leading to the Millenium problem further hurts their case imo.
    - simianwords 13d ago
      they lied about their performance by.... solving a famously hard problem to solve? Edit: The "reputable academic" who accused OpenAI had to say this about LLMs and the recent result. source: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf > “the results are not the important thing.” > “the important thing is instead the significance that a mathematician and an LLM model can now do all this work in a month.” > “This is a Deep Blue-Kasparov moment.” > “incredibly important developments.” > “If indeed an OpenAI model did close the gap to Navier-Stokes, that is a remarkable thing and it should be said loudly, by them, with the history intact.” Clearly Buckmaster (who is probably one of the most accomplished academics in the field) himself doesn't believe that AI has stalled. What makes you think you are right?
      - vrganj 13d ago
        Solving is a very interesting way of describing what happened. Unless you believe them over reputable academics I suppose? I will note the remarkable goal post shift in your edit - giving direct counter evidence to your own earlier claim of an OpenAI proof - and leave it at that.
        rieie 12d ago
        [dead]
      - mac-attack 12d ago
        We are approaching what is likely the biggest existential crisis in human history. Unfortunately, there will be people that refuse to tackle the issue head on and will instead narrow their focus on data that suggests that tomorrow will be like today.
johnnienaked 13d ago
How can you not believe it? Neither of them are even close to making a profit and the market is saturated with cheaper alternatives. This is a ploy for regulatory capture.
- Footnote7341 13d ago
  You're wrong about profits.
  - quikoa 13d ago
    Are you sure you don't mean revenue? Given the enormous investments profits seem very unlikely.
  - johnnienaked 13d ago
    Anthropic's profit estimate they released a while ago was a masterclass in deceptive reporting. They didn't include training costs, stock based compensation, or liabilities. Token gross margin is not profit.
  - Insanity 13d ago
    They haven’t posted a profit in any quarter, and even IPO dates are slipping. They have revenue, not profit.
simianwords 13d ago
[flagged]
- ofjcihen 13d ago
  I mean, more simply (and with less vitriol) - AI has yet to be profitable for these large labs (also zero moat etc.) - There is considerable hype and people are tired of it. - HF incident (and apparently many others that these labs are not reporting on or don’t even know about) proves they have terrible security practices and that’s about it. - NS is incredibly suspicious timing wise. You are sprinting around these threads to misrepresent the average persons issues with AI. I don’t know why people having those issues seems to be taken as a personal attack for you.
dumberquestions 13d ago
I don't think the technical aspect is true, performance has been growing fairly consistently, but the financial aspect, or more accurately the logistical aspect, is plausible; with competition as fierce as it currently is, for how long can they keep growing at the same pace? People can't afford RAM anymore and datacenter build outs aren't particularly popular, OAI has been doubling compute capacity every 7 months for the past 3 years, it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long, something has to give. And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government. Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.
- simianwords 13d ago
  I just find it strange how multiple people throw completely different arguments just to land on same conclusion. Your argument seems to mix a few arguments like: OpenAI has so much demand and it has made so much compute that it is a bad thing (?!). It can't go on (why?) hence the capabilities are stalling (how?). Then you also say that it is too competitive which is a totally different argument to compute. So in this thread we have multiple vectors of arguments like - high competition - high demand for compute (not sure how this hurts OpenAI but whatever) - capability has stalled
  - dumberquestions 13d ago
    I never mentioned capability stalling, my point is that if you extrapolate the same rate of growth just a few years into the future, you quickly reach logistical impracticality, I don't think It's hard to deduce that AI compute can't keep doubling every 6 months for long. The other part is that this is happening because the foundational model business is both extremely successful and competitive, if it wasn't as successful the market demand would've been saturated by now, and if it wasn't as competitive a single monopoly could've paced things more reasonably from the beginning.
  - webern777 12d ago
freejazz 12d ago
>Can you explain why you believe this? Well, as a starter, I've been told that AI will take my job for at least 3 years now. That's not happening. In fact, what's happening is that I now have an AI vendor BEGGING me to use their product, which of course, cannot do my job.

asdfman123 13d ago

Actually, one of the major challenges they'll face is getting enough electricity. That could stop AI growth in its tracks.

darth_avocado 13d ago
I think it’s more than money and slowing progress. Public perception on AI is in the gutter. That is a much bigger threat to these companies. They’re trying to turn it around.
- batshit_beaver 13d ago
  Trying to turn it around by once again claiming that ai is an existential threat and will take everyone’s job right before brutally murdering every human. These companies don’t appear to give a single fuck about public perception. Only their investors and the government (in anticipation of the biggest bailout in human history).
- asdfman123 13d ago
  Public perception is another big one. But I think with the way AI is slated to grow exponentially it's going to hit electricity limits very soon. Big tech can build a huge data center in 5 years but scaling up the electrical infrastructure is mired in red tape and can take on the order of decades.
  - anjel 13d ago
    How did modernization get subsumed into scaling up. The us power grid has been outdated tech for decades
  - pianopatrick 13d ago
    Someone will likely come up with some clever way to make AI use less electricity. There's probably something in how you design the models or chips or some other thing that will be figured out over the next 5 - 10 years to make these use dramatically less electricity.

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]