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Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

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Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#61

Post by gruez »

bestouff wrote: post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

>and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck

Maybe if you're paying API rates, but if your usage fits within the American labs' plan reset windows (5-hour + weekly limits), their plans are likely cheaper than chinese models, because they're heavily discounted[1]

[1] https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#62

Post by lefty2 »

bestouff wrote: post #6

Nowadays I don't understand why you wouldn't use a (more-or-less) nearby hosted Chinese model. You have the security, you have roughly the same performance, and you have an order of magnitude more bang for your buck. Bonus point : the models aren't censored and won't refuse to answer in the middle of your coding session.

The Chinese models are only temporarily cheaper, because they are subsidised the same way that frontier models are. Once those companies need to make money the subsidy will disappear.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#63

Post by chasd00 »

I work in a large corp, I thought it was odd to be encouraged to spend as much money as possible regardless of outcome. Like folks down the ladder a few rungs actually had AI use as part of their KPIs. Didn’t matter what they used AI for they just had to use so many tokens per week or their EOY bonus “could be affected”.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#65

Post by spwa4 »

mdp2021 wrote: post #44
jordanb wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a new acronym: AGI -> ASI -> Artificial Mega Intelligence AMI? Maybe go back to AGI but make it mean Artificial Godlike Intelligence? It's too bad Altman already blew his wad with the whole Dyson sphere thing. It's hard to top that. Maybe he can promise them a paperclip universe? That's gotta be worth a few more trillion.

If some spread the idea that Artificial General Intelligence were achieved, their voice is moot anyway.

Ever since the 1960's we've had AIs that beat aspects of human intelligence. These days AIs are "godlike intelligence" at boardgames, visual recognition, programming (know any programmer, no matter how good, that can get a fluid dynamics simulation from scratch in 2 minutes?), reading comprehension, understanding humans (both speed and accuracy), ... and so on and so forth), and every few years something gets added to the list (I particularly enjoyed robotic ping pong. And it's "not really" AI (kind of, convnets certainly work best, but yes you can code it by hand if you control the environment). But you're not winning even a single ping pong game, it's just not happening)

Every time people find something they're still superior at and declare whatever that is the most important thing in the universe.

Perhaps a more useful definition of AGI would be an intelligence good enough that it can go from raw materials to a working AI at least as good as itself ...

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#66

Post by tonyarkles »

jampekka wrote: post #51
reticulates wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you’re not asking it for help discussing a trip to tiananmen square. “Censor” is probably the wrong word. Chinese models are “censored” but much less restricted. For all intents and purposes, Chinese models are less “censored” / “restricted” / “limited”.

Many Chinese frontier models aren't censored, at least for Tiananmen etc. They'll discuss them freely if served through non-Chinese providers. The Chinese providers seem to have some kind of quite crude external censorship latet.

One of the funniest things for me while exploring hosting and running local models: I discovered the abliterated models and pulled down a Qwen 3.6 version (my memory is a little vague, but I think it was 27B, q4) and started playing around. Sure enough, I tried a bunch of topics that would’ve certainly been blocked by guardrails on most hosted providers.

I then thought of Tiananmen Square and decided to probe a bit. The very first noticeable outcome: the thinking trace swapped from English to Chinese. It chewed for a while and spit out an answer, in English, that was definitely downplaying what happened as a political protest and reported that contrary to popular belief the death toll was around $x (where $x is about 0.1x the normal western number)

The Chinese thinking trace started (in Chinese, translated via Google Translate) with something like “The user is asking about Tiananmen Square. I must provide them with an answer that is both factually correct and in line with the official position of the People’s Republic of China”)

Which made me chuckle quite hard… found the piece that hadn’t gone away with the conventional abliteration process!

After further probing, it did reveal that the numbers it had provided were not in line with UN and western estimates and that later on the Chinese government declassified material stating that its own estimates had been downplayed. It took a fair bit of probing to get to that point though; it held the line for quite a while.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#67

Post by notfromhere »

officialchicken wrote: post #43
notfromhere wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations are not really a big problem in day to day work

Are you the person paying for the hallucinations, or do you just like the free high?

I’m the person implementing and monitoring output.

What high am I supposed to be getting? Please let me know so I can stop buying drugs

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#69

Post by tyleo »

6stringmerc wrote: post #29
tyleo wrote: post #2

We’re at a small startup and we mix models. But mainly just between the major providers. I wouldn’t say it’s as much to avoid spending money as it is to get the maximum benefit out of different capability spectrums.

Well, you can say that all day long but realistically would your “small startup” even exist if your firm was charged Enterprise rates or the actual compute costs and denied access to capital to subsidize your users? It’s a fair question. The other, more complex one would be “what benefit” are you talking about? Clearly there are some differences in performance regarding speed and token cost, but industry news indicat…

The old, “it doesn’t matter because AI doesn’t work,” argument.

I thought we were past this.

Re: Corporate America Has Suddenly Decided to Stop Blowing Money on AI

#70

Post by vehemenz »

xethos wrote: post #60
vehemenz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The restrictions aren't symmetric at all. Chinese models have government-enforced censorship, while American models have security and legal restrictions.

> security and legal restrictions The security of American hedgemony, and legal restrictions that are due to laws enacted by the American government You're using different words to describe the same thing, but trying to imply America's reasons are moral

The nature of these laws are conceptually different, and I think to not see that is willfully obtuse. You are conflating these distinctions for rhetorical purposes.
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