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GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

martinalderson.com

341–350 of 495 posts

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Brought on by government edict” No, brought on by a novel pathogen that killed 10 million people. It would’ve been much worse without government action.

Without the indecisive government action that was taken, millions more people would have died, but the economy would have done better. With decisive government action (see New Zealand), millions less people would have died, and the economy would have done better.

New Zealand does have the advantage of an ocean border and thus near total control on entries and exits.

Compared to the very porous land borders of the US.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#342

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…

Asking claude to implement a single feature that takes under 30 minutes consumes 10-30 dollars of tokens in api costs.

And if the engineer bills for $100/hr or more, the trade off is worth it

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#343
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…

There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though: 1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much m…

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Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#344
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sinc…

> the world's dominant power by virtue of having roughly half the total world population

If human+ level AI takes off one would expect to see a great decoupling of power from population.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#347
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…

I suspect the concern is that model serving is a stateless “simple” problem.

As yet, no one has identified a reliable moat in inference. If the moat is performance, then prices will collapse. Unlike traditional cloud moats around state, operations, and capex management - I can host a model reliably with less than 30 minutes effort.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but there is prestige to consider. Many people are motivated to buy the best, even if it's much more expensive. "We're building a mission critical application here. Sure the API costs are much higher, but it's worth it."

I could spend $1000/day with Fable and it would be worth it. It has much deeper systems thinking, enabling me to trust it to follow my instructions and not fuck things up. 1. That confidence and quality is worth the price. 2. We're accelerating at lightning speed now. If you don't spend, someone else will and they'll eat your cake. We're nearing the point where you could spin up an entire YC startup in a day. That ch…

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Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#349
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GLM-5.2 is not as good as Opus, it's better. I can abliterate GLM-5.2 and have it work on projects that Opus refuses.

I'd guess opus refusals are not an issue for 95%+ of people. Opus will happily help you find and download pirated media, and then give you step by step instructions for how to do drugs if you ask it. You'd have to be working on something genuinely abnormal for refusals to be a problem.

While that might might be true nowadays, Anthropic has started to work very hard on fixing that.

They just started with it not helping with software security.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#350
post #92

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.

> The userspace libs don't have a stable ABI at all, and this is a widely discussed problem.

And DLL hell isn’t? Or the shambolic mix of 32 and 64 bit libraries on Windows?

Anyway, desktop binaries are increasingly rare for business software.

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