Live data from Hacker News

GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

martinalderson.com

351–360 of 495 posts

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You left out the one that will: federal government industrial policy

So the federal government industrial policy is the thing that supposedly will keep the prices on "A and O" high in the US while the rest of the world will get comparable AI competing to get cheaper and cheaper?

Yup. Just like electric cars. Actually, more like network gear - so only non-western countries.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#352

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…

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

It is the difference between giving an LLM an epic and say "You figure it out" and giving the single tasks' breakdown you envisioned and build incrementally on top of it.

With the latter you can, for example, say "Wait, this should be an interface because later on we need different concrete implementations". With the former, the agent doesn't do that, gets to the point where you actually need the flexibility interfaces give you and refactors everything to handle that. That is at least 2x the work/tokens. Multiply this for all the decision points you have to do to deliver a big piece of work and you have your bagillion tokens consumed.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#353

I wonder if anyone has actually measured the difference in verification time between these models. A senior dev in a high cost of living area costs the company something like $200 an hour. If a cheaper model produces code that takes an extra 20 minutes to debug or verify because it missed a subtle edge case, you have already lost any savings from the lower API bill. It feels like the real moat for labs like Anthropic…

[flagged]

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#354
Companies like Amazon taking out loans to fund more AI infrastructure, coupled with AI companies that are massively overvalued and burning cash, coupled with companies saying there’s no ROI from AI investments, coupled with the margin from selling AI models trending to zero paints a nasty picture that can’t continue much longer.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#355
Meanwhile:

> China’s Ministry of Commerce has led meetings over the past month with major AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and http://z.ai/, to discuss measures that would restrict overseas access to cutting-edge AI models, including models that have not yet been released.

> The discussions reportedly include not only closed-source models but also open-weight models.

> Future regulations could take the form of a tiered framework based on technological capability. Basic open-source AI models may be managed through a filing system, high-performance models may be subject to security reviews, and the most sensitive frontier models may be banned from public release or restricted to use within China

https://www.reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-ove...

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#356

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.

This argument is so flawed in many ways, economies are built by people for people. Extrapolate the numbers, let's say in the COVID Pandemic a country, take USA as example, has 10% percentage of their population killed by it, would that be better to the economy?

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#357

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…

To be clear, some of the token expense is because it's encouraged, and it's encouraged at some companies so that people will break out of their existing workflows to hopefully find useful new ways of working or building

There is more to it than this, but much of the cost structure around subscriptions etc is specifically designed to allow for that experimentation.

There are good cynical takes, here, too. At the current model costs I don't need to optimize my expenses, but that could change if it climbs eg above 30% of my salary^

Note: this is an easy thing to prove ROI on. If I'm writing 5-6x more code and reviewing commensurately more code, and those PRs are better-tested and get us to shipping quality features faster, this is easy to justify and we are not that price sensitive

^ https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2070915302058041450

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#358
post #355

Meanwhile: > China’s Ministry of Commerce has led meetings over the past month with major AI companies, including Alibaba, ByteDance, and http://z.ai/ , to discuss measures that would restrict overseas access to cutting-edge AI models, including models that have not yet been released. > The discussions reportedly include not only closed-source models but also open-weight models. > Future regulations could take the fo…

Yep https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48816025

And EU leadership completely destroyed Europe's future by betting on depending on US and Chinese models. https://pleias.ai/blog/fable-eu

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#359

> the least understood upcoming shift in AI economics. Then proceeds to talk about something in the AI news every day. Hey, did you guys hear? Open source models are cheaper and their quality is increasing! So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus. Second, yes, open source models will put pressure on margins...eventually. Everyone knows that. But do you think today's AI business model is the same as tomorro…

re: "So, first, by no measure is GLM5.2 as good as Opus."

I accept that for you and your work this is true.

I have a different experience: for a month I paid big money for Opus and got a lot done. Now I am gorging on GLM 5.2 running on Fireworks.ai and I am also getting a lot done for about 15% of the money.

Everyone should do their own evals on their own work.

Post reply on HN