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GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

martinalderson.com

411–420 of 495 posts

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#412

GLM5.2 is not the concern, it's that there's many good Chinese models and labs, glm, qwen, deepseek, kimik, mimo, longcat, minimax, hy3, Ernie, etc They have figured out how to train, plenty of them and are consistently doing so

It wasn't really a secret, the main constraint is lack of compute resources

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#413
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…

Makes sense. AI is a munition now, and nations tend to restrict them. Eventually there will be international open source communities building open weights (all you need's a few smart people and a lot of GPUs for training), making the restrictions moot. Until then this will become the norm.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not understandable IMO, bad guys will still have guns.

Sure they will, but that doesn't mean that every bad guy should have nuclear weapon. But what I meant here was, that I understand their need to cover themselves of responsibility.

Oh yes, their need to cover themselves is understandable for sure :)

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#415
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is a good list. While I'm sure many companies could be added, I only post to include DEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation whose `vt50/vt100/vtXX` ideas may be with us, in software, for perpetuity unless something like Arcan ( https://arcan-fe.com/ ) ever takes off.

Arcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're applying US cultural logic to Chinese bureaucracy

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#417

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…

They are offloading thinking to the AI too.

It then has to look over everything see how it connects together and then decide the best way to do something.

Giving it small and very focused plans when you already understand the system gets it done fast and cheap.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#418
post #395
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.

disagree. you don’t care if your task was solved by 130 iq or 160iq model.

what matters is that it surpassed let’s say basic 120iq barrier and price

that’s why glm5.2 is a drop in replacer for most of the population. not fable 5 really

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've heard it said that Oracle doesn't have customers. They have hostages.

Still, the clock is ticking. I don't know of any "new" company that would use Oracle instead of e.g. Postgres or would migrate to it. That's probably why they're pretty desperate to jump onto something new before the old source of income fizzles out.

Re: GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse

#420
post #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

Why? Worst se we are 10 years behind them. Second mover advantage will also be there, it this is so critical indeed.

What happened to China because they were third movers in the race to the nuclear weapons? Nothing. They were pretty behind for a while technologically. The wheels have turned. Stop looking at the world as a short strategy game match, or like a Hollywood movie where everything is all-or-nothing. Many parts of south America are way behind in IT, automotive, space, yet many people have meaningful and happy lives there.

I'm yet to accept that the power-block I'm living within being first in the AI race provides a meaningful life to me.

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