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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

#391

Post by Lalabadie »

WarmWash wrote: post #382
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.

They won't? They're profiting from every subscription to AI providers, because all companies are state-owned.

They're also well-positioned to control how groundbreaking US AI companies are allowed to appear to their investors, by offering open models that match what market leaders claim can only be attained with trillion-level spend. That's a strong control on US economy, considering how few stocks are propping up the US stock market, and how these stocks are all dependent on the same beliefs and factors.

Also, regarding China's tech investment in general, the five-year plan is just... available to read. It's not a secret. It explains the strategy, and you can draw a direct line from the plan to their now abundant solar infrastructures and tech achievements, including in AI, which is specifically named.

https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year...

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#392

Post by KoolKat23 »

myrmidon wrote: post #367
alecco wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is pure speculation at this point tbh. 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 thus not worth throwing subsidies at, because any economic advantage is fleeting at best). Looking at the data and related past experience, this looks like a pretty solid bet (despite the "risk" being hard to quantify).

Open source is currently entirely reliant on Chinese models.

So basically EU will be left behind unless we start doing something about it now. imo Mistral isn't enough by itself.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#393

Post by sajithdilshan »

nightski wrote: post #387
sajithdilshan wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does meta has an AI training data center in EU?

They can just operate and provide normal access to their services, just block AI access. This is already happening, apple would not release new Siri in EU (granted it's due to a regulation clash) but this would be a testing point.

If Europeans are still paying the same prices for sub par services/products to their American counter parts, it's win-win situation for those companies. Just sell a dumbed down non-AI version of service/product in EU for an inflated price.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#394

Post by myrmidon »

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #389
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…

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 f…

I'm unsure what exactly you mean by sigmoid stacking.

I'd argue that a lot of important technologies (like circuit design!) started at basically zero in the last century, and the progress was actually exponential for a significant time (=> because we started so low on the curve).

But if you reduce things to a single metric (wealth per person? total energy available to humanity? global industrial/construction output in tons?) I can't think of anything where such "stacking" successful subverted the sigmoid trend (or looks like it will, long-term).

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#395

Post by cdavid »

Obertr wrote: post #118

Metaphor i like is that it will be as cheap as electricty? Do you know who is supplying your electricity or which factory it runs on? probably no, bc its a commodity and mostly settled and there is so many energy resources. some are alternative some are coal mines. And they all fight in the supply demand trade for energy which is happening real time ( think open router here) And eventually the consumer wins bc of the…

The metaphor breaks quickly because as a first approximation the electricity "quality" does not depend on the provider, and will not change overtime. That's not true of LLM output.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#396

Post by WarmWash »

Lalabadie wrote: post #391
WarmWash wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They won't? They're profiting from every subscription to AI providers, because all companies are state-owned. They're also well-positioned to control how groundbreaking US AI companies are allowed to appear to their investors, by offering open models that match what market leaders claim can only be attained with trillion-level spend. That's a strong control on US economy, considering how few stocks are propping up th…

China's five year plan is whatever Xi wants whenever he wants it. It's just a formal guideline, not a law or constitution people can sue the CCP over.

Also, even if China decides it doesn't want to keep the crown jewels of productivity close to home, the US will ban their import. Maybe XzeRo_337 will be torrenting weights and have a VPN to access foreign providers, but Timmy and Ashley are just going to pay for their ChatGPT subs, and Mega corp will pay their Claude Legend token expenses.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#397

Post by bushido »

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…

Reporting/news around AI is so very interesting these days.

It's really hard to tell what's propaganda from what's not.

For examples, this Reuters that you have included here has all tells tale signs of creating fear, uncertainty, and feeding into propaganda. But then again I can't be sure.

It's completely the opposite stance to (a) the actions being taken by chinese companies and (b) the public stance taken by their govt https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#398

Post by nicce »

bushido wrote: post #397
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…

Reporting/news around AI is so very interesting these days. It's really hard to tell what's propaganda from what's not. For examples, this Reuters that you have included here has all tells tale signs of creating fear, uncertainty, and feeding into propaganda. But then again I can't be sure. It's completely the opposite stance to (a) the actions being taken by chinese companies and (b) the public stance taken by their…

> It's completely the opposite stance to (a) the actions being taken by chinese companies and (b) the public stance taken by their govt https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202601/08/content_WS695f1b55...

That source is very old, considering how fast everything is changing. It is not impossible if US actions for banning have changed something.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#399

Post by ramoz »

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…

5.6?

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#400

Post by deaton »

w29UiIm2Xz wrote: post #74
lompad wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If AI replaces labor, that's a trillion dollars of labor. About one-fifteenth of annual labor/wage earnings.

If AI replaces labor, there will be no money to make back
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