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Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

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Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#11

Post by sholladay »

terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Open models are pretty good at this point but the problem is that they are limited by the tooling and infrastructure that surrounds them. For example, the last time I tried to set up web search with an open model, the experience was pretty bad.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#12

Post by wahnfrieden »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #10
terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Affordability of hardware that can run local LLMs is a real factor, too. Not sure when RAM prices are going down, but with everything that’s happening and can happen in the world right now, it doesn’t look like it’ll drop in the near or medium-term

No one is going to run models that are comparable to frontier locally without spending enormous sums for use at scale or in large orgs. Even with cheap RAM, you will still need a very large budget for frontier-level capability.

Open models that are competitive with frontier will be used on shared hosts.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#14

Post by BrtByte »

sho wrote: post #8

I am no-where near as concerned by this as I was a year ago, when I was expecting the axe to fall at any moment before the Chinese labs achieved some sort of escape velocity. I now think it's too late, all the cats are out of all the bags, there's no moat except maybe a temporal one of a few months, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have so…

I agree the genie is out of the bottle technologically. I'm less convinced that means access stops being politically and economically important. The bottle may be gone but the best lamps are still expensive

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#15

Post by thesmtsolver2 »

zelon88 wrote: post #2

> And it doesn’t stop with the security questions: the Trump administration’s signature style of international engagement is to wield American leverage as a bundle. Deadlocks in trade negotiations are broken by threatening to withhold intelligence, tech deals are stalled by reference to food safety standards. And so I don’t know when a U.S. administration would choose to leverage its seemingly inevitable predeploymen…

[flagged]

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#16

Post by vasachi »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #7
terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Llama is not months behind GPT 5.5 Pro. I don't think Qwen or DeepSeek are either. edit: I'm specifically referring to the "5.5 Pro" model, not regular 5.5 with Pro tier subscription. Claude has no model available that's comparable to 5.5 Pro either.

I’ve used DeepSeek 4 Pro through Claude. It’s fine. Plans are similar to what sonnet/opus make. Same massage-the-plan -> massage-the-code loop. Maybe the code is a bit worse, but that’s the “months behind” thing.

The thing is, vast majority of code tasks aren’t a venture into the unknown. We as an industry for the most part build CRUD interfaces and dashboards. That can be achieved, with supervision, with frontier open-weights models quite well.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#17

Post by BrtByte »

terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Open weights undercut the absolute cutoff scenario. They don't fully solve the question of who gets the best model first, who gets enough tokens to use it heavily, and who gets to integrate it into sensitive workflows without waiting for permission

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#18

Post by fwipsy »

vasachi wrote: post #16
wahnfrieden wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Llama is not months behind GPT 5.5 Pro. I don't think Qwen or DeepSeek are either. edit: I'm specifically referring to the "5.5 Pro" model, not regular 5.5 with Pro tier subscription. Claude has no model available that's comparable to 5.5 Pro either.

I’ve used DeepSeek 4 Pro through Claude. It’s fine. Plans are similar to what sonnet/opus make. Same massage-the-plan -> massage-the-code loop. Maybe the code is a bit worse, but that’s the “months behind” thing. The thing is, vast majority of code tasks aren’t a venture into the unknown. We as an industry for the most part build CRUD interfaces and dashboards. That can be achieved, with supervision, with frontier op…

I think maybe you are both right. Perhaps AI coding assistants just don't need to be all that smart in many cases, so open weights models are fine. At the same time, frontier models are advancing in other domains, like mathematics, where raw intelligence is a more important factor.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#19

Post by jorvi »

BrtByte wrote: post #14
sho wrote: post #8

I am no-where near as concerned by this as I was a year ago, when I was expecting the axe to fall at any moment before the Chinese labs achieved some sort of escape velocity. I now think it's too late, all the cats are out of all the bags, there's no moat except maybe a temporal one of a few months, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have so…

I agree the genie is out of the bottle technologically. I'm less convinced that means access stops being politically and economically important. The bottle may be gone but the best lamps are still expensive

Virtually no one is going to pay for the best performing lamp if the next best lamp does 90% as good for an order of magnitude cheaper.

I will say, as pointed out by others, DeepSeek and other Chinese providers still lack a bit in the tooling that Claude has, but they'll get there.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#20

Post by BrtByte »

coderenegade wrote: post #5

The distillation risk has been brewing for a while now. In a very real sense, the model is the data, so if the data is locked down because of how valuable it is, it was only a matter of time before fully open access to the models would be revoked. There's also an additional economic concern that rarely gets mentioned: because no one has cracked continual learning, keeping models up-to-date and filling in gaps in perf…

This is a good point, especially the "model is the data" framing
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