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Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

adlrocha.substack.com

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Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#51

Post by [deleted] »

energy123 wrote: post #43
WarmWash wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- 'Automation will lead to immediate devaluation of human labor that is routine. Society needs to decouple a person's "worth" from their "utility as a tool".' I have this vision that in absence of the ability for people to form social hierarchies on the back of their economic value to society, there will be this AI fueled class hierarchy of people's general social ability. So rather than money determining your neigh…

If we have post scarcity due to AI, everything becomes so uncertain. Why would we still have violent and crazy people? Surely the ASI could figure it out and fix whatever is going on in their brains. It's so fuzzy after that event horizon I have no confidence in any predictions.

[deleted]

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#52

Post by mr_00ff00 »

gertlabs wrote: post #46

Neither intelligence nor context are what really differentiate the most successful model for programming (Claude Opus 4.6) from slightly 'smarter' competitors (Codex 5.3, Gemini 3.1 Pro). It's tool use and personality. If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses. There is still incredible untapped potential there. I maintain a benchmark at https://gertlabs.co…

“ If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses.”

Unless you’re a machine learning engineer with something to share, our current models are not even close to general AGI, and won’t make it.

My understanding (as just an engineer) is that LLMs continue to improve at crazy rates, but it’s clear this is not the answer for AGI.

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#53

Post by argee »

jfalcon wrote: post #7

>someone raised the question of “what would be the role of humans in an AI-first society”. Norbert Wiener, considered to be the father of Cybernetics, wrote a book back in the 1950's entitled "The Human Use of Human Beings" that brings up these questions in the early days of digital electronics and control systems. In it, he brings up things like: - 'Robots enslaving humans for doing jobs better suited by robots due…

> 'An economy without human interaction could lead to entropic decay as machines lack biological drive for anti-entropic organization.'

Not quite the point the quote makes, but it reminded me of the short SF story "Exhalation".

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#55

Post by loss_flow »

Only scarce context is a moat and what is scarce is changing quickly. OpenClaw is a great example of the context substrate not being scarce (local files, skills are easily copied to another platform) and thus not providing a moat.

Claude's recent import of ChatGPT's memory is another example of context that was scarce becoming abundant (chat export) and potentially becoming scarce again (OpenAI cutting out chat export).

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#56

Post by freediver »

As much as I use AI in daily workflows, I do not think an AI-first society will ever be a thing.

Historically there is no evidence of that happening with tech revolutions - or rather perhaps you could say to some extent - you can not say that we are an internet-first society, or cars-first society or mobile phone - first society despite these being profound technological revolutions.

And more importantly, the only science fiction movies that talk about "AI first societies" tend to be dystopian in nature (eg Terminator). And humans eventually always do better than that.

As much as the world in Star Trek is advanced for example, with all the fancy AI there is, it is still a human-first society. Only 10% of any Star Trek is about AI and fancy technologies, 90% is still human drama.

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#57

Post by skeptic_ai »

baxtr wrote: post #54

For anyone worried about AGI coming soon. Today I asked Claude to stop using em dashes. That was his/her answer: Noted — I'II avoid em dashes going forward and use other punctuation or restructure sentences instead.

I know some very smart guys that don’tknow how to use a microwave. And what? Doesn’t mean much

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#59

Post by gertlabs »

mr_00ff00 wrote: post #52
gertlabs wrote: post #46

Neither intelligence nor context are what really differentiate the most successful model for programming (Claude Opus 4.6) from slightly 'smarter' competitors (Codex 5.3, Gemini 3.1 Pro). It's tool use and personality. If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses. There is still incredible untapped potential there. I maintain a benchmark at https://gertlabs.co…

“ If models stopped advancing today, we could still reach effective AGI with years of refining harnesses.” Unless you’re a machine learning engineer with something to share, our current models are not even close to general AGI, and won’t make it. My understanding (as just an engineer) is that LLMs continue to improve at crazy rates, but it’s clear this is not the answer for AGI.

I think if I asked for most HN users' requirements for AGI 8 years ago, we would already be well past them. Now that we see the nature of how artificial intelligence is unfolding, and how the intelligence is different than human intelligence, everyone is moving their goalposts (including me).

But if we're being honest, frontier LLMs are effectively more intelligent than a non-negligible proportion of the population (for example, at pretty much all white collar IC work, pattern matching, problem solving, etc.). And in the ways that most people are still smarter (having sentience/emotions/desires that drive us to take initiative toward meaningful goals), I think it's great that AI does not match us there, but also doesn't disqualify it from being intelligent. The harness can bridge the gap there.

Re: Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat

#60

Post by lefstathiou »

steveBK123 wrote: post #20
7777777phil wrote: post #2

API prices dropped 97% in two years so the model layer is already a commodity. The question is which context layer actually sticks. The OpenClaw example in the article (400K lines to 4K) is a nice proof point for what happens when context replaces code. I've been arguing for some time now that it's the "organizational world model," the accumulated process knowledge unique to each company that's genuinely hard to repl…

The way many corporates are using the models nearly interchangeably as relative quality/value changes release to release, AND the API price drops do make me question what the model moat even is. If LLMs are going to make intelligence a commodity in some sense, where does the value end up accruing will be the question. Picks/shovels companies and all the end user case products being delivered? Mainframes value didn't…

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