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

writing.antonleicht.me

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

#51

Post by omnimus »

ageitgey wrote: post #45
gpt5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish it was true. I would gladly use a GPT 5.2 high model equivalent for coding (6 months old) if it was offered cheaper by Deepseek or Kimi. And I'm sure that's an extremely prevalent opinion by the millions of Claude and Codex users who are bothered by the costs. However, they just don't perform that well in practice. That's the real issue. You can actually see it when you move away from open benchmarks. Deep see…

Have you tried the latest DeepSeek v4 Pro inside of the Claude Code harness? It's not listed in that site. It definitely 'feels like' it is as good as Claude for many regular web app coding tasks (though I don't have real benchmarks). And it is comically cheap. I'm not suggesting it is better than the latest Claude or codex models, but it seems 'good enough' for a lot of use cases in my limited real world testing.

Also so many developers i know use LLMs for one shoting isolated problems, explainers, discussions and planning. For these even Kimi is pretty great.

I don't think every dev will be comfortable just releasing claude on their project.

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

#53

Post by pu_pe »

The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters. Let's say Europe breaks apart from the US completely tomorrow. It does not have enough datacenters (or GPUs in general) to sustain its inference needs even if it would resort to Chinese open models. And to build new datacenters, it would need to source parts from the US and China.

In other words, if AI does have continued significant economic impact, only the US and China would be able to leverage it completely. The rest of the world is implicitly betting that AI won't be good enough, or that eventually the compute curve flattens out so using a model that is 10x larger only leads to marginal benefits.

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

#54

Post by ElFitz »

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…

> The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up

And even then, their is no stickiness. For most use cases there isn’t much value in one frontier model over the other.

Just have to look at the people flocking from one to the other for whatever reason.

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

#55

Post by ElFitz »

hbarka wrote: post #43
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…

Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.

I thought so too.

But 1) people use other models with that same harness. 2) I moved on from Claude Code and all the features I cared for up and running in less than a couple days. Without even looking for available plugins or extensions.

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

#56

Post by dotancohen »

ElFitz wrote: post #54
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…

> The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up And even then, their is no stickiness. For most use cases there isn’t much value in one frontier model over the other. Just have to look at the people flocking from one to the other for whatever reason.

The large AI houses arguably ensure that model switching be a natural action for their clients, by switching the default model of their flagship offerings every few months. Such is the price of progress.

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

#57

Post by pu_pe »

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,…

There are two problems with that scenario:

1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model. In a scenario where you already have other major disadvantages (access to capital, labor), you might be outcompeted

2. Open models have been keeping pace very nicely, but they rely on distillation of frontier models. If the race gets really tight, this could be affected so that the time gap grows larger (ie, it's very unlikely anyone but Anthropic is distilling from Mythos at the moment)

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

#58

Post by 9dev »

zozbot234 wrote: post #46
wahnfrieden wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> No one is going to run models that are comparable to frontier locally without spending enormous sums for use at scale You can always run these models cheaper locally if you're willing to compromise on total throughput and speed of inference. For most end-user or small-scale business needs, you don't really need a lot of either.

It would be awful if running models locally became the primary way of using LLMs. On dedicated servers sharing GPUs across requests, energy usage and environmental impact is way lower overall than if everyone and their mother suddenly needs beefy GPUs. It’s the equivalent of everyone commuting alone in their own car instead of a train picking up hundreds at once.

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

#59

Post by 9dev »

shevy-java wrote: post #25

So now AI is about apartheid. I am not liking this at all.

Stop using this word so lightheartedly. You have no clue what you are talking about, and ridicule millions of people who have suffered through decades of oppression.

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

#60

Post by chii »

BrtByte wrote: post #13

The uncomfortable implication is that "AI sovereignty" may end up being less about training your own GPT-class model and more about securing compute, energy, datacenter security and contractual access

It's the same as energy sovereignty.
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