GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse • Hacker News Board

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#381

Post by fulafel » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

alecco wrote: post #358

davedx wrote: 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

EU's leadership doesn't have much power that way, the EU is a thin layer on the countries.

In the US the federal government has much more power but nobody is attributing the term good fortunes of the AI industry to the recent federal policy there. (There's long term stuff that does make a difference in hoovering up the global R&D talent and concentrating capital, but that's a different kettle)

EU budget is about 1% of the GDP of the countries (from https://commission.europa.eu/topics/budget_en)

There's very little betting on any particular AI models going on by the commission/EP. The Pleias article claims a 2020 eurocrat whitepaper determined how things go, but that's fantastical.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#382

Post by WarmWash » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:28 PM UTC

davedx wrote: 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…

It absolutely blows my mind that everyone is abundantly aware that money is not shared freely, and yet they are already popping champagne that the CCP are surely going to share power freely.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#383

Post by sajithdilshan » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:30 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #378

sajithdilshan wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition And that's a bet they will lose 100%. Once the Chinese starts imposing export bans/controlling the access to their models, Europe would be at the mercy of US/China to allow them access or just rely on miserable mistral

Again, you are assuming that frontier models will stay meaningfully ahead long-term. Export controls/bans are pointless if this is not the case. There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven…

It is not about intellectual advantage, but about capabilities as well. Assuming that Europe would get all the knowledge they need on the cutting edge technology on how to train a frontier model (which they won't because US and China would guard this as national secrets), who is going to setup infrastructure to train the model? Who is building the data centers (multi-year project) and who is going to build the energy infrastructure? Just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you have the capability to do that as well.

One of the best example is nuclear reactors. By now the know how and technology is fairly mature and open, but not every country gets to build nuclear reactors. Same would be with the frontier models as well.

EU should have already started investing in the infrastructure side in-case they obtain the know how, but your politicians are still bickering on pension reforms and Ukrainian war, etc.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#384

Post by bitexploder » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC

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…

When a hyperscaler is viewed as a software company their stock and value multiplier is much higher than if they are viewed as a commodity with expensive infrastructure costs. There is now not enough compute resources to serve demand. It requires sustained capital to grow compute resources. The costs are uncollapsing due to the overall demand plus the pressure of LLMs. Capital costs matter.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#385

Post by kzrdude » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #82

I would not be unsurprised if the US govt steps in to prevent this. They'll do anything to stop China getting ahead in the AI race. There's the sanctions already implemented, next step might be giving these companies government funding, just like they do with military companies.

Don't Anthropic and OpenAI both already have military contracts? They are already growing into that fabric I think.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#386

Post by ben_w » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

irishcoffee wrote: post #331

abirch wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stand up against tech? Cut off your nose to spite your face? Apple sure won’t care. Nor is Apple all encompassing of “tech”

> Apple sure won’t care

Europe collectively is about 26.7% of their 2025 revenue, according to SEC filings, so I bet they'd care.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193250...

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#387

Post by nightski » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

sajithdilshan wrote: post #383

myrmidon wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you are assuming that frontier models will stay meaningfully ahead long-term. Export controls/bans are pointless if this is not the case. There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven…

It is not about intellectual advantage, but about capabilities as well. Assuming that Europe would get all the knowledge they need on the cutting edge technology on how to train a frontier model (which they won't because US and China would guard this as national secrets), who is going to setup infrastructure to train the model? Who is building the data centers (multi-year project) and who is going to build the energy…

So Deepmind/Meta/etc... would all have to cut off their EU offices even though they hold incredible talent? I'm just not finding this scenario likely.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#388

Post by echelon » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

cbg0 wrote: post #258

echelon wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We're accelerating at lightning speed now. Accelerating how much slop you can output? A better model will still produce slop for your feature factory that pumps out software which nobody is interested in buying.

I'm at a 3M run rate in 4 months. Because I'm solving real problems.

You don't seem like an entrepreneur. Why are you on HN?

YC wants people to build AI startups. You're here shitting on them. Half of this community is. You're all a bunch of old men grumpy at the new tools.

I'll offer my own analysis: if you're not using AI very effectively, you won't have a career in computing in a few years.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#389

Post by peterbell_nyc » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

myrmidon wrote: post #378

sajithdilshan wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could just as well read the european approach as a bet that frontier models will be unable to keep a significant edge over open competition And that's a bet they will lose 100%. Once the Chinese starts imposing export bans/controlling the access to their models, Europe would be at the mercy of US/China to allow them access or just rely on miserable mistral

Again, you are assuming that frontier models will stay meaningfully ahead long-term. Export controls/bans are pointless if this is not the case. There is ton of strong indicators that they will not stay ahead: Assuming that technological progress of any kind follows some form of logistic function (where "gains", in this case "intelligence" become sub-linear at some point) is (long-term) a very conservative and proven…

I would take the other side of this bet. While I agree that the impact of any given advance is likely to resemble a sigmoid curve, I think there is a material chance of "stacking sigmoids" creating something that looks exponential.

To take a simple example, look at the progress of technology over the last ~500 years - it seems to me that the rate of change continues to accelerate despite many of the logistic curves flattening along the way.

There are still huge unanswered questions about whether or not the stacking sigmoids will favor the incumbents. But I would not definitively bet against the people with the most compute data, talent and money.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#390

Post by echelon » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

koolala wrote: post #250

echelon wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe YC could just give Fable 2 or 3 the funding directly. Sounds like the only thing left will be market control. The only winners being hardware gatekeepers and the investors in them.

Depends on whether open source can keep up. If not, this is 100% the future.