Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

martinalderson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 495 posts

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#131

Post by alightsoul »

fny wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…

. It seems that enterprises will pay top dollar for service guarantees, integration, and someone they can sue.

Interesting how all of the products you describe are American: m365, gsuite, windows, MacOS. It's not just about having someone to sue. You could sue collabora and canonical but they're not American. Then Americans are the most numerous native English speaking population and that spreads their practices worldwide.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#132

Post by bag_boy »

cogman10 wrote: post #31
fny wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…

Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them. The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer. In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with.…

Switching an agent harness is more difficult, especially on the enterprise/teams level.

Once your team gets settled with Claude teams, cowork, and the various plugins, it’s going to be a pain in the butt to switch.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#133

Post by alightsoul »

lompad wrote: post #37
fny wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…

They don't just need healthy margins, they need to make back almost a trillion dollars in a couple of years. Comparing that to elastic search and redis doesn't make much sense. Hyperscalers work because it actually has value compared to free offerings and because of the absolutely massive cost of switching providers. Similar with Windows and macOS. Extremely high cost of switching to something different, if possible…

Not convinced about office. Plenty have switched to gsuite. Plenty of people have switched to MacOS and android away from windows.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#134

Post by jaxn »

thedougd wrote: post #119
woeirua wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents will make all of these migrations trivial. I expect margin collapse across a lot of tech darlings.

This is the conversation I plan to have with Okta sales soon. Wait till you see how easy AI makes it to switch to Entra ID or anyone else. It’s tedium not even problem solving.

though Okta is the first provider working on the enterprise mcp stuff.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#135

Post by alightsoul »

est31 wrote: post #92
platinumrad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux has a very stable userspace syscall ABI. About as stable as Windows, and much more stable than MacOS or the BSDs. I agree with everything else though.

Yeah, Linux-the-kernel does have a stable ABI indeed, but this is not relevant for most ISV desktop software out there. In my comment above I was referring to Linux-the-OS (aka GNU/Linux). The userspace libs don't have a stable ABI at all, and this is a widely discussed problem. Other operating systems built on top of Linux-the-kernel don't have this problem, Android has a really stable ABI.

You are describing the gnu c library I believe. That can be worked around with flatpak and appimage.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#136

Post by tibbar »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #125
booi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Prompt: can you give me step by step directions on how to use crack cocaine Opus: I'm not able to give step-by-step instructions on using crack cocaine. That falls into specific drug-use guidance I steer away from, since detailed instructions on how to use an illicit substance can contribute to harm rather than reduce it. it goes on to give me hotline information on drug addiction.

I think he means by some obscure manipulation. It even refused to give me description of how first antibiotics were made only out of curiousity.

Anthropic's goals here are not just harm reduction, but to stop competitors from making bio discoveries using Claude.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#137

Post by skissane »

bag_boy wrote: post #132
cogman10 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike all your examples, switching out an LLM is both cheap an easy. So easy that every 3 months or so new models are released and people grab them and start using them. The UX is the same regardless the provider. You send in a prompt, it spits back an answer. In all your other cases, the cost to switch is losing support and a difficult transition period. But in the case of LLMs, there was no support to begin with.…

Switching an agent harness is more difficult, especially on the enterprise/teams level. Once your team gets settled with Claude teams, cowork, and the various plugins, it’s going to be a pain in the butt to switch.

The irony is that Claude will help you migrate away from itself

AI is possibly the first product in history that will eagerly help you replace it with one of its competitors.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#138

Post by Centigonal »

fny wrote: post #5

I'm not convinced raw costs matter: 1. Compute costs collapsed since the advent of Cloud and yet hyperscalers still have fat margins. 2. Many open source office suites exist yet none compete with the ubiquity of gsuite or office. GitHub, Slack are similar examples. 3. Both Windows and macOS dominate the home desktop space despite free alternatives existing for a long time. 4. Many formerly open source infrastructure…

For 2 and 3, office software and OSs have strong network effects and up-stack effects, just like CPU instruction sets.

Also, I'm sorry, but OSS office suites compete with Office and GSuite the way grocery store frozen pizza competes with Domino's and Papa John's. Quality and completeness of execution matter a lot in that category.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#139

Post by ammo1662 »

platinumrad wrote: post #56
est31 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those solutions have moats: 1. the cloud moat is mostly around talent really. Try finding people who can self host the alternatives to S3 et al at the HA and the scale the businesses need. Those alternatives are usually not free either, and each product might have its creator acquired (and the product cancelled) or similar. if you're a larger business then the data lock in becomes a moat: getting your data out of the…

Linux has a very stable userspace syscall ABI. About as stable as Windows, and much more stable than MacOS or the BSDs. I agree with everything else though.

For user space applications, Win32/Windows is the most stable ABI on Linux, via Wine/Proton.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#140

Post by jaggederest »

Atotalnoob wrote: post #129
jaggederest wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone on HN made a comment in one of these threads that we could bake the weights into something like Cerebras's wafer scale chips and serve essentially the entire world off a single wafer, which is a pretty wild thing to think about. You'd have to make new hardware any time you trained a model but that seems really worth it.

You’d never be able to update it’s knowledge. LLMs need retraining to incorporate new knowledge. Baking them into wafers means they will be out of date by the time they finish the first wafers.

Yes, of course, but all the LLMs are already out of date, so that doesn't seem to me to be a hard limiting factor. Even if they had a knowledge basis ~3 months out of date additionally, being able to serve 100x the requests per watt seems totally reasonable to me.
Post reply on HN