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

writing.antonleicht.me

111–120 of 227 posts

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

#113

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.

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

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.5-pro is a thing

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

#114
post #104
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.

In theory yes. They've got a bargaining chip with TSMC. But it's unclear how much use that would be without a safe shipping route between Europe and Taiwan and/or a navy capable of maintaining such.

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

#115

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 happe…

I think so too. The rich will be richer, but also more people will have more at the same time. As Civilization put it: 'Just as it has always been'

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

On the same topic but from a slightly different angle - as SOTA models get more capable, the 'quality' and 'feel' of the experience they provide in each domain is heavily dependent on the reinforcement learning the vendor does for that specific domain. After all, many fields have 100 flavors of "good answers," but the model has to pick one answer.

Benchmarks are not very good at capturing this yet. But it could be the case that DeepSeek v4 Pro is 100% as good as Claude Opus 4.7 at scaffolding a basic Rails app, but absolutely terrible at creating a credible business plan that another businessperson would think is real. That's a made-up example, but you get the point.

The end result will be a lot of people arguing about which model is "better," but "better" depends heavily on the task and how that model was trained to interact with the user for that task. Two users may have very different qualitative experiences using the exact same model, despite the benchmarks.

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

#117

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.

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

lol

(tap view all on yr link or ask gpt to search for you next time)

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

#118
post #74
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…

What about access to GPUs and memory? This is becoming a pretty major bottleneck.

It's basically converted sand. Most of that conversion happens in Taiwan at the moment. Which is considered, by China, to be one of their provinces and as a protectorate by the usa. Hence the interest in that region....

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

#119

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 happe…

It took almost two centuries for broad middle-class living standards to become common for large population after Industrial revolution - and that happened after intense fight for rights and fair share of economic gains.

So, sure, AGI might raise equality - but that's only if we fight for it.

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

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters. Is it even though? Quantization and speculative decoding are improving the local AI story by leaps and bounds every month.

Speculative decoding is not that useful at scale, it's mostly about making local single-user inference faster. When you're batching multiple inferences together, that's already as fast as the verification you have to perform w/ speculative decoding.

The future will have LLMs running local at your laptop/devices. If not almost exclusively then at least for 90-95% of the tasks. Speculative decoding is just one technique out of many existing and more to come that will make this even more viable. The gap is closing on both fronts. Software gets faster/more clever. Hardware gets faster and smaller. The single user story is the story. I'm obviously speculating myself, but that's how I see it.
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