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OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

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Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#341

Post by scotty79 »

eigenspace wrote: post #9

The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck. 10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly. Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom.…

> The fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck.

Why shouldn't it work though? It's just models teaching other models same way humans are.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#342

Post by adastra22 »

xdertz wrote: post #331
adastra22 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how it works though. Two training runs on the same data don’t produce the same weights. And if you want to modify the AI, you do so by fine tuning the weights not rerunning training. In every respect that matters, the weights are both the binary and the source code together.

This is the same as saying every binary is open source because you can look at and change the machine code. Open source means you reveal how you created this binary.

But training is not deterministic. The same training run on the same input can result in very different models. And even if you ignore the intrinsically stochastic part of training, the effort of creating a model is ad-hoc and involving humans. It is a crafted output, not a compiler output. The pre-training is the closest to being mechanistic, but these models are so many layers of work on top of the pretraining, and those higher layers have people in the loop. They run experiments, tweak things, run experiments again.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#343

Post by adastra22 »

MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #197
kzrdude wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. But models in difference to compiled binaries, are useful as just weights and can be further refined and post-trained, at least. I don't know LLM theory well enough to say if there's some secret sauce they can hold back that makes training ineffective. Less effective I'm sure, we don't have access to their smart training schemes, but post-training should always be possible IIUC.

At the risk of taking the analogy too far, I would treat refining like modifying a dynamic library. You can technically modify behavior, but only in a very coarse way. post-training is like writing a wrapper around the binary. It is closer to building on top of than truly modifying, in that you can tailor things to your needs slightly but cannot make fundamental changes to the underlying thing.

Are you assuming single-layer LORA fine-tuning on top? Because with open-weights you can do full back-propagation training to mold the model into whatever shape you want.

For a stretched analogy, I think it is more like LEGO sets. Someone hands you a 10,000 piece masterpiece, and a box of unused LEGO parts. Hackers on HN object that the LEGO part manufacturing process is not included, you can't make your own parts, etc. But it's LEGO. You can pull apart the model, see how it is constructed, add your own refinements and features, or even redo it from the ground up. In a practical sense having knowledge about the factory making the parts doesn't really matter here.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#344

Post by lxgr »

RugnirViking wrote: post #325
lxgr wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the five hour limit effectively gone, at least on ChatGPT Plus? I haven't seen it in a while now.

I seem to hit it fairly regularly still, but i grant i use more sol than i should on my personal projects - they're mostly reverse engineering so imo quite hard

Oh, it just returned for me today as well. I'm pretty sure it was gone for the past few weeks though!

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#345

Post by sebzim4500 »

colingauvin wrote: post #105
sebzim4500 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt he was claiming that. He's probably saying that the ability of Chinese companies to be able to distill frontier US models has put downwards pressure on the price of all models.

I'm saying that it is unclear that without distillation this wouldn't still be happening. There is a massive narrative that no one but OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can make a model without distilling. But there's basically no evidence of that.

I think it's more that distilling is enormously cheaper than training from scratch to achieve the same results

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#346

Post by truncate »

ACCount37 wrote: post #318
truncate wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they can figure out something else out? I recall couple years ago when China didn't have enough GPUs (still don't?), DeepSeek team figured out how to train with less computing. IIRC they made Mixture of Experts mainstream and made really optimized kernels and clever use of PTX instruction set.

"China does it in a cave with a box of scraps" is a myth. Chinese labs play the shell game to get their hands on a lot of compute outside China. Tricks like distillation save compute in the RL leg of the process - where a lot of the frontier labs puts their own training run compute.

I'm sure they do, but its not 0 or 1 thing.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#347

Post by Gigachad »

cdelsolar wrote: post #328
Gigachad wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic scraped the whole web, scanned every book, pirated every bit of media to feed in to their training. Distillers are doing essentially the same thing scraping all the knowledge from the LLM to create a training set for a new one. They are crying about theft after committing the largest theft in human history.

Why is it theft to read all content ever

If it's not theft to do that, then it isn't theft to distill the models. Anthropic wants it both ways.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#348

Post by phoghed »

kgwgk wrote: post #339
hamandcheese wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you were referring to one kind of eclipsed and with my subtle edit I was referring to a different kind of eclipse :)

I can think of one single class of eclipse where the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun (the original comment was about “in-between sun and earth”).

Going to start a conspiracy theory that there’s a secret eclipse where the moon goes behind the sun and they won’t let us see it

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#349

Post by VulgarExigency »

giwook wrote: post #333
VulgarExigency wrote: post #134

Maybe it's because I don't use it in Codex, but I don't like working with Sol. It CONSTANTLY omits things it shouldn't, and is always dispatching sub-agents to do what I tell it to do, that don't have all the necessary context, and so they go on and do the research that was already done by the top-level agent. It's maddening. I tried it again today because of the discount, it told me it couldn't run acceptance tests…

> I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me. You must not have been using agents for very long then because this behavior has been around for some time now.

I've been using them for a bit over an year now, although I've ramped up usage in the past few months (like everyone else, I suppose). They've hallucinated and lied, but none have ever been as persistent liars as Sol has to me.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#350

Post by jml78 »

Gud wrote: post #293
NegativeLatency wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you buy a laptop or phone not made in china, not made from parts from china? At a regular store not some weird nerd laptop for normies.

China doesn’t produce the chips that AI runs on.

That was true a year ago but is no longer true. Deepseek is training and running inference on Huawei chips.

The times of China needing Nvidia chips is quickly coming to an end.

I guarantee that China will scale faster, build faster, and ultimately produce far more chips than the rest of the world combined in 5 years.

Our export controls sank the west. It would have been better to allow them to use Nvidia chips. Now they will have chip fabs that aren’t quiet as good but way more of them. Their investment into sustainable will make the power so cheap that the less efficient chips will not be a relevant issue

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