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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

#101

Post by pjerem »

pu_pe wrote: post #57
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 tim…

> 1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model.

If the small (and I'd even say, sometimes imperceptible) difference between Opus & DeepSeek v4 Pro is such a disadvantage for your startup, it's that your startup have an issue, not the LLM.

At the end of the day, your startup is there to solve real problems and even before the LLMs, being fast at coding things have never been such a huge competitive advantage compared to marketing, sales, customer support, product vision ...

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

#102

Post by DCKing »

gpt5 wrote: post #83
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Deep seek 3.2 is 4% on Arc-AGI 2 Why are you bringing up an outdated Chinese model from 6 months ago to compare to a US model from 6 months ago? The outdated Chinese model will have performance from ~12 months ago, obviously. But today's Chinese model DeepSeek 4 has performance not far from the US model 6 months ago; 46% compared to 52% from 5.2.

Because Deepseek 4.0 is not yet there, but the jump isn't expected to be large. Kimi 2.5 is there and is also scoring low.

Deepseek V4 came out three weeks ago: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro

Kimi K2.5 has also been superseded by a finer tuned Kimi K2.6 three weeks ago. Moonshot's Kimi models appear to be the favored Chinese model, at least for coding, and not Deepseek V4. z.AI's GLM 5.1 is also worth mentioning as rather competent for coding, also released in April.

Those models too will not be beating US AI labs by your metrics (although for coding, Kimi K2.6 might beat the very uneven Gemini depending on the situation), but in your critism at least consider the state of the art in your comparisons.

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

#103

Post by cubefox »

lugu wrote: post #92
cubefox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone recently made a graph showing that the gap between US American frontier LLMs and Chinese open weight LLMs (including DeepSeek v4) is widening. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore. Update: GPT-5.5 found it. Article: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/05/caisi-evaluati... Graph: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/images/2026/05/01/1...

Someone is an official website of the united states gouvernement. I would prefer another source.

I think no other source exists.

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

#104

Post by yalok »

pu_pe wrote: post #53

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 significa…

but ASML is in Europe - so they hold at least some critical part of the stack.

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

#105

Post by lostmsu »

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.

There's no evidence there's any 5.5 Pro model distinct from 5.5 xhigh or whatever.

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models

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

#106

Post by thepasch »

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.

> Harness engineering is a moat.

I mean, if that’s the case, then Anthropic themselves are currently actively filling in that moat with nice, solid, walkable dirt. Claude Code may have been a moat 6 months ago but these days you’ll want to replace the “m” with a “bl”.

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

#107

Post by nimonian »

zozbot234 wrote: post #96
PAndreew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to feel like a parrot, but people seem to forget that software engineering is actually a very narrow slice of the white collar pie. You don't need a mega-model which can reason about 100 000 lines of code when you want to create a nice PPT (which consumed literally hours of your life before) to impress your boss. SOTA models will probably be used for frontier research, complex coding tasks, large scale d…

Creating a nice PPT is actually hard because it requires visual capabilities and so-called "computer use" (really, GUI use) of fiddly proprietary software. The nice thing about the coding case compared to a lot of disparate white-collar work is that it's all plain ASCII text. You can already ask a coding model to create a nice TeX/beamer slideshow (or whatever the Typst-based equivalent is) but whether your boss will…

This is a tangent but I'd also mention sli.dev -- slideshow-as-website is really great and fun to make with llms

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

#108

Post by amelius »

9dev wrote: post #58
zozbot234 wrote: post #46

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 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.

It's even more awful if the compute capital is owned by only a handful of players.

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

#109

Post by threepts »

When intelligence is a commercial commodity, it is only bound to happen that the rich gatekeep it to secure their socioeconomic status.

But, I think, with every revolution, hierarchies have only historically fallen only for the former serfs to rise.

The industrial revolution, the renaissance -> all were marked by an massive shift in the socioeconomic status and the rise of the middle class.

I think AGI, when it happens, will only raise equality. I may be wrong.

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

#110

Post by lmm »

baq wrote: post #62
jorvi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet it seems that 90% are happily paying for the marginal 10% capability and saturate datacenters.

Happy to pay for? Or happy to spend other people's money on?
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