Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

emergingtrajectories.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 349 posts

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#171

Post by stillpointlab »

margalabargala wrote: post #140
stillpointlab wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if I imagine Anthropic giving away unlimited Sonnet 4.5 away at $20, I would still be paying the $200 for fable. It is a bit like saying "why would you hire someone with a doctorate when you could get unlimited high school grads". How appealing that sounds depends on your needs.

Right, and while there are needs that require a doctorate, having unlimited high school grads would be immensely useful for many many tasks. The ability levels of the cheap models are encroaching on the abilities of the frontier models faster than frontier models are expanding their abilities. If we haven't already, we will very soon reach a "good enough" state where having the "best" model matters less and less and…

I think there is growing confusion in this discussion. I am saying "I see the fixed nature of ASICs creating a barrier to their adoption despite how cheap they are".

Many of the responses seem to say "but there is a market for cheap models".

There is a world where we have cheap models and we don't have ASICs powering them. Things like TPUs and NPUs, which are programmable, are likely to fill that role. They are optimized for inference while also allowing different (and updated) models to run on them.

Given two companies competing on the cheap end. First company goes TPU, second goes ASIC: who wins? My bet is on TPU since they can update their model, even if their hardware is slightly more expensive and slightly slower, since the optionality of new models beats the performance gap. That may not hold forever but given the pace and volatility of the current LLM market, I believe it will hold for some time.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#172

Post by drob518 »

stillpointlab wrote: post #126
alex43578 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the gamble comes down to how many tokens need to be served on your best model, versus how many can be served in the cheapest/fastest way. Imagine if Anthropic could give effectively unlimited access to Sonnet, for $20. Wouldn’t that be an appealing option for many users? I know I’d make a lot of use of it for agentic tasks, office work, summarization, etc; when right now I’d save quota for more important task…

I mean, if I imagine Anthropic giving away unlimited Sonnet 4.5 away at $20, I would still be paying the $200 for fable. It is a bit like saying "why would you hire someone with a doctorate when you could get unlimited high school grads". How appealing that sounds depends on your needs.

Sure, but you’re undoubtedly the tip of the spear. Lots of people don’t need that.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#173

Post by LarsDu88 »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #168
hughw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Fable 5 model running at 9,000 tokens/s on an ASIC rather than 150 tokens/s on electricity chugging Nvidia GPUs, or even giant SRAM Cerebras or Groq chips could be good enough to meet the majority of demand. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Agreed 100%. This guy thinks there's a limit on the demand for intelligence. You think that Fable 7 which can run a billion dollar corporation on its own has no consumer demand just because we have fable 5 at 9k tok/s? Who do you think will be the biggest customer of such a model? Fable 7, obviously.

Certainly there will be demand for Fable7, but that demand is context specific. Frontier labs' profit is dependent on there being sufficient demand for the next layer of capability and whether the premium consumers are willing to pay for that.

The incremental unlock of capability by ever increasing frontier model sizes will eventually reach diminishing returns.

I would argue tnference speed increases would actually unlock a different kind of more meaningful value for a wider audience.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#174

Post by drob518 »

JacobAsmuth wrote: post #168
hughw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Fable 5 model running at 9,000 tokens/s on an ASIC rather than 150 tokens/s on electricity chugging Nvidia GPUs, or even giant SRAM Cerebras or Groq chips could be good enough to meet the majority of demand. 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

Agreed 100%. This guy thinks there's a limit on the demand for intelligence. You think that Fable 7 which can run a billion dollar corporation on its own has no consumer demand just because we have fable 5 at 9k tok/s? Who do you think will be the biggest customer of such a model? Fable 7, obviously.

Of course not. But many tasks won’t require Fable 7 level intelligence and many people won’t want to pay for it. Honestly, I’m using Deepseek v4 Flash a LOT lately to do more mundane tasks because it’s so nearly free and I don’t need Fable or even Opus. Serving those mid-level models at high speeds and low prices is a definite winner for lots of applications. And sure, the frontier models will continue to drive the frontier forward.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#175

Post by margalabargala »

stillpointlab wrote: post #171
margalabargala wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and while there are needs that require a doctorate, having unlimited high school grads would be immensely useful for many many tasks. The ability levels of the cheap models are encroaching on the abilities of the frontier models faster than frontier models are expanding their abilities. If we haven't already, we will very soon reach a "good enough" state where having the "best" model matters less and less and…

I think there is growing confusion in this discussion. I am saying "I see the fixed nature of ASICs creating a barrier to their adoption despite how cheap they are". Many of the responses seem to say "but there is a market for cheap models". There is a world where we have cheap models and we don't have ASICs powering them. Things like TPUs and NPUs, which are programmable, are likely to fill that role. They are optim…

The reason you are getting "but there is a market for cheap models" as a response, is people saying in a roundabout way "but soon models may not need to be updated".

Models like Kimi 3, GLM 5.2, or even Fable 5 for that matter are reasonable to burn to.ASIC because they are over the threshold of "good enough to be generally useful", something that will continue to be true in the future.

Most people do not need the latest model, they need a sufficient model. If I had Fable 5 on an ASIC, I imagine I would use that and ignore paying API rates for Fable 6.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#176

Post by stillpointlab »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #108
stillpointlab wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced, mostly because things like crypto, which I believe went into ASICs, were based on very slowly moving and mostly understood algorithms. LLMs and model architectures seems significantly more volatile. I wouldn't want to be working out the finer details of my chip rollout only to find a new paper/approach that give multiples of performance. So I guess it depends on how much the latest-greatest model m…

Honestly, whether you think burning current SOTA to hardware is an overinvestment risk depends on what your definition of intelligence is. If you think intelligence is something that can grow like height such that 18 months from now we will basically be bowing down to machine god giants that are running on B200s, then investing in ASICs is the wrong move. However, if you you subscribe to the (very reasonable view) th…

I think part of this thinking is in reverse. What I mean by that is people are saying something like "Imagine if 18 months ago a company started to create an ASIC based on GPT-4o (or whatever was good at the time). By today they'd have a model that is not great by today's standard but good enough".

Maybe, but what is the shelf-life of that 18 month decision? Barely good enough today, when it launches, starts to get worse and worse every month going forward. You have to recuperate that investment on your depreciating asset.

And you are competing against anyone with the foresight to use a TPU instead, and the benefit from any new paper that finds how to distill, quantize or whatever better so their solution gets algorithmic boosts while you are locked in.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#177

Post by drob518 »

efficax wrote: post #152
umeshunni wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the winner will be whoever burns their models to ASICs fastest. I don't understand how this works when the models are evolving so fast that your burned ASIC is outdated (or at least not top of the line) in a few weeks.

for many purposes they're good enough now. If I had an opus 4.8 class model on a box next to me that could produce tokens at rates like 5000/s, i don't know if i'd need a new one for a long time. I think we might be underestimating how powerful very very fast LLMs could be, since they could iterate on tons of small variations on tasks. paired with deterministic guardrails that gate "doneness", you could loop on tasks…

Exactly. A fast, cheap model, particularly with the right harness and loops, might take us a lot farther than we might guess.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#178

Post by stillpointlab »

margalabargala wrote: post #175
stillpointlab wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is growing confusion in this discussion. I am saying "I see the fixed nature of ASICs creating a barrier to their adoption despite how cheap they are". Many of the responses seem to say "but there is a market for cheap models". There is a world where we have cheap models and we don't have ASICs powering them. Things like TPUs and NPUs, which are programmable, are likely to fill that role. They are optim…

The reason you are getting "but there is a market for cheap models" as a response, is people saying in a roundabout way "but soon models may not need to be updated". Models like Kimi 3, GLM 5.2, or even Fable 5 for that matter are reasonable to burn to.ASIC because they are over the threshold of "good enough to be generally useful", something that will continue to be true in the future. Most people do not need the la…

> but soon models may not need to be updated

Which is why my original post mentioned the volatility in models. We aren't just doing research on frontier, there is a huge amount of research on quantization, distillation, etc. that is changing the landscape at the low-end almost as much as it is changing on the frontier.

And it is also why I mention revealed preference. What feels sufficient / "good enough" today is a moving target. This isn't just a question of what you want, it is a question of what is economically viable for the entity that will be designing, manufacturing and marketing this ASIC of which you speak.

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#179

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

overgard wrote: post #121
sowbug wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a popular misreading of the state of the law. Someone tried, as a bit of a stunt, to register a work for copyright with generative AI as the sole creator/author. That registration was rejected. This is quite different from a person using generative AI as a tool to create a work. People have copyright in photos and videos they create, even if they used a camera. Same with images and code, even if they used an…

This isn't quite true: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 The clearest part from the page: > Before the proliferation of generative AI, U.S. courts did not extend copyright protection to various nonhuman authors, holding that a monkey who took photos of himself lacked standing to sue under the Copyright Act; that human authorship was required to copyright a book purportedly inspired by celestial beings; an…

So if I write one line of code in a 1M line LLM codebase, is it mine?

Re: Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling

#180

Post by vitally3643 »

alex43578 wrote: post #147
hadlock wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had 2b models give a plausible Paris vacation itinerary. A tools-capable 12b and especially 30b model from 2026 is certainly capable of producing passable results. I was demonstrating the qwen 3.6 27b model I stood up last week to my wife and it gave her a passable Moroccan Chicken recipe. With tool calling (search) they're quite good.

With OpenAI having released 20 and 120B models a while back, I think they recognized that tiny models were never going to be a defensible income stream. Any value will come from the largest models, and those largest models are unlikely to ever run on consumer hardware within their window of relevancy.

You're missing the point. You very rarely need the biggest and "best" model. This is psychology and nothing more, people always want the "best" and don't often consider "good enough".

Small models are good enough depending on your task. That's the point. A model you can run on your phone or laptop is an incredibly useful tool for a lot of problems even though it isn't the "best" theoretically possible model.

Post reply on HN