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GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

martinalderson.com

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Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#291

Post by ben_w »

logicchains wrote: post #277
abirch wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factor in that Europe is powerful partly because of its unity and there are many forces trying to undermine that.

Europe became powerful before it was unified, and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage.

We first became powerful because we did the industrial revolution before anyone else, and used more of that capacity to fight the world (and win) than to fight each other.

When we fought each other, after the industrial revolution, that was the Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars.

> and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage.

I wouldn't say it was "ever since the creation of the EU", but rather "roughly between WW1 and decolonisation". Post-Cold-War the EU has taken over from the former global importance of the member states, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

That said, east and South Asia are regaining their multi-millennia history of being the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population.

And to agree up-thread, there's plenty going that can rapidly turn the EU's economy into a disaster if not handled expertly.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#292

Post by a_c »

Regarding the lack of vision part, if you are using Claude or opencode, I've made a skill[1] that let's you talk with any models in Claude/opencode mid-session. You ask "Have claude opus to look at this PDF for a second opinion" during a session of claude with GLM5.2 or opencode with GLM5.2

It doesn't need to pass whole conversation history as context (unlike /model), you can ask follow up to that forked model (which sub agents in claude doesn't support AFAIK), and you can ask models from opencode while using claude.

[1] https://github.com/kmcheung12/second-opinion

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#293

Post by abirch »

logicchains wrote: post #277
abirch wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Factor in that Europe is powerful partly because of its unity and there are many forces trying to undermine that.

Europe became powerful before it was unified, and ever since the creation of the EU it's been becoming less and less important on the world stage.

Yes, Europe was powerful when they had colonies.

Currently, Europe can stand up against tech. Apple could easily prohibit iPhones from going into France but I doubt it cutting off the entire EU.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#294

Post by walthamstow »

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.

Plugins and skills are completely trivial to move and most work with any model. What is not trivial are Anthropic's new managed agents vendor lock-in offering.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#295

Post by bushido »

01100011 wrote: post #151

I'll agree but from the other direction. AI continues to absorb my job as a senior systems software engineer (c/c++) and after a couple months I've only spent a few hundred dollars using gpt-5.5/5.6 and codex. I have no idea what people are doing to burn so many tokens but for me this is laughably cheap and every day I discover new capabilities. I don't care if costs go up or down, it's so cheap for what I get that I…

It seems like you're basing your spend on the subsidized consumer subscriptions. The equivalent API costs for these subscriptions is usually 12-20x.

Any overages (hourly/weekly/model) on these plans gets billed at rack API costs.

Its not practical to expect these subsidies to last for very long.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#296

Post by zjaffee »

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…

Hyper scalers have a decent margin from a small number of their services and a much more normal if not a loss from many others. Additionally a massive part of their profit is support services and contracts.

They also benefit from the fact that developers do what is convenient for themselves and not what is necessarily computationally efficient (i.e. not pay attention to cross AZ egress/ingress, run an apache spark job when it could be done all within a normal database, build their entire product on irreplaceable/unswappable cloud provider specific databases and storage solutions).

AI will also experience a significant margin collapse, it's just not clear who will eat the brunt of it yet, the AI companies themselves or companies like Nvidia as more chip manufacturers/designers come into the arena and can meaningfully compete.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#297

Post by soulofmischief »

dakolli wrote: post #192
jesse_dot_id wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same experience. I literally cannot fathom how people burn the number of tokens they claim to.

because they don't know what they're doing.

If you learn to give people the benefit of the doubt and keep an open mind, you might learn something new.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#298

Post by moxza »

saberience wrote: post #269
peab wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on what you're doing, but most LLM usage and agentic runs are pretty interchangeable in my experience, and it's usually trivial to switch. If anything, you're better off supporting multiple LLMs as backup because most model providers have been so inconsistent with working all the time

Dude it’s not trivial to switch because the behaviors are different! You’re clearly not building a product based on an LLM. I’m still using various old Anthropic and OpenAI models for products I’ve built and released because I can’t risk the behavior changing in unpredictable ways and the users being pissed. It’s much easier to switch out some deterministic software than an LLM which you’ve spent a ton of time on tes…

For the public facing consumer functionality I have Gemini Flash running on guardrails directed by a state machine that calls it statelessly everytime. For that, it's strictly locked to a version. I can't afford to suddenly get responses that the SM is not tuned for.

As for which model does the building... I'm not at all attached. Enough logic, and CI gates/tests live outside the whims of the LLM to be able to hotswap them any time.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#299

Post by NostraDavid »

pixlmint wrote: post #199

Last month, I cancelled my Claude Pro subscription and instead used those 20$ to purchase Openrouter Credits. Most of my knowledge-seeking questions can be answered by Gemma4, for basic code editing, Qwen3.6 27b is enough, and for really difficult tasks, GLM5.2 doesn't leave me hanging. I'm by no means a heavy AI user, so I'm even saving money going the API Credit route and relying on the smallest possible model depe…

What do you use as interface to OpenRouter? I, too, am looking into using an API to see if I can reduce costs (I use OpenAI + Github Copilot, currently). TensorX instead of OpenRouter (because it's in Europe, and EURouter wanted 15% more money from me :P), but I'm not sure if I want to change a configuration in vscode every time I want to switch the model in the Claude extension (and having an API key in my settings feels iffy too >_>)
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