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Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

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Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#121

Post by mordae »

cubefox wrote: post #50
terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Someone recently made a graph showing that the gap between US American frontier LLMs and Chinese open weight LLMs (including DeepSeek v4) is widening. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore. Update: GPT-5.5 found it. Article: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/05/caisi-evaluati... Graph: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/images/2026/05/01/1...

Give it time. It's inevitably a logistic curve.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#122

Post by tirpen »

cubefox wrote: post #50
terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Someone recently made a graph showing that the gap between US American frontier LLMs and Chinese open weight LLMs (including DeepSeek v4) is widening. Unfortunately I can't find it anymore. Update: GPT-5.5 found it. Article: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/05/caisi-evaluati... Graph: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/images/2026/05/01/1...

This is propaganda, not data.

If the Chinese government published a graph that said the opposite, would you consider that a serious and objective source?

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#123

Post by duskdozer »

9dev wrote: post #58
zozbot234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one is going to run models that are comparable to frontier locally without spending enormous sums for use at scale You can always run these models cheaper locally if you're willing to compromise on total throughput and speed of inference. For most end-user or small-scale business needs, you don't really need a lot of either.

It would be awful if running models locally became the primary way of using LLMs. On dedicated servers sharing GPUs across requests, energy usage and environmental impact is way lower overall than if everyone and their mother suddenly needs beefy GPUs. It’s the equivalent of everyone commuting alone in their own car instead of a train picking up hundreds at once.

Maybe people would target their use more appropriately, then.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#124

Post by Paradigma11 »

jorvi wrote: post #19
BrtByte wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the genie is out of the bottle technologically. I'm less convinced that means access stops being politically and economically important. The bottle may be gone but the best lamps are still expensive

Virtually no one is going to pay for the best performing lamp if the next best lamp does 90% as good for an order of magnitude cheaper. I will say, as pointed out by others, DeepSeek and other Chinese providers still lack a bit in the tooling that Claude has, but they'll get there.

That presumes that there is a linear scale that measures performance. This can be tested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model

Even assuming this holds, what utility you gain by the best models depend completely by your workload. If you have tasks that require performance 10 and DeepSeek has 9, you will gladly pay for SotA models.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#125

Post by dinkumthinkum »

Animats wrote: post #66

Over on the image generation side, "frontier AI" seems to be coming along rather well. Watch this video, which was released eight days ago.[1] Can you find any flaws? Two years ago, just getting hands with the right number of fingers was tough. Last year, there were jarring errors in every scene. Now, very little is wrong. How much longer will anyone need Hollywood studios? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zTCLIh…

I hear you. It is impressive technically but as far as finding flaws, I will just say this. This looks like something aliens would create in a dystopian simulation based on very odd understanding of old movies. I found it quite unsettling. Do you really think this would replace films with real actors and real writers (assuming they left the millennial talk and "modern audience" stuff)? I think the memes and parodies for AI video is more interesting than this kind of thing.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#126

Post by turpentine »

Animats wrote: post #66

Over on the image generation side, "frontier AI" seems to be coming along rather well. Watch this video, which was released eight days ago.[1] Can you find any flaws? Two years ago, just getting hands with the right number of fingers was tough. Last year, there were jarring errors in every scene. Now, very little is wrong. How much longer will anyone need Hollywood studios? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zTCLIh…

The video doesn't even have to load to know it's AI generated. The channel profile thumbnail and the video description are dead giveaways. The first frame of the video has too many errors to be worth repeating here. The first 0.5 seconds of the video has implausible movement.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#127

Post by Havoc »

Think this somewhat underestimates economic pressures the US labs are under.

OpenAI etc need to make crazy revenue to get their investment math to work. Perhaps you can sell some tokens to privileged partners at a premium rate but I think they’ll need global scale ultimately

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#128

Post by yorwba »

sho wrote: post #8

I am no-where near as concerned by this as I was a year ago, when I was expecting the axe to fall at any moment before the Chinese labs achieved some sort of escape velocity. I now think it's too late, all the cats are out of all the bags, there's no moat except maybe a temporal one of a few months, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have so…

All of the reasons in the article also apply to Chinese companies. If a Chinese model becomes good enough to make it significantly easier to hack Chinese government servers, do you think they'll allow random people unfettered access to it?

The economic pressures are the same, too. Currently, Chinese models are offered for cheap or in some cases provide weights for free because that's the only way to gain traction. (That closed-weight releases by Baidu, Bytedance, iFlyTek etc. hardly generate any buzz bears that out, as does the fact that when Alibaba does a closed-weight release, someone always gets confused because they associate the Qwen brand with open models.) At some point, their investors are going to want profits, not just user counts. That means higher prices, or no more new models.

If there's no secret sauce and all you need is scale, that would actually be kind of the worst-case scenario for catching up to the frontier, since scaling is expensive and the frontier model companies have easier access to capital as well as higher revenues.

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#129

Post by usernametaken29 »

energy123 wrote: post #99
usernametaken29 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked extensively on ARC AGI before and one thing is SURE as hell. OpenAI and Gemini in particular use this as marketing material. You can correlate the benchmark release with stock price increase. They feed synthetic datasets of ARC into their models to boost the numbers. There is no doubt in my mind Gemini is no better than DeepSeek other than being specifically fine tuned for ARC AGI. Heck, they even say so and…

Why do you think DeepSeek isn't also fine tuned on ARC AGI? Maybe they're more fine tuned on ARC AGI but still get worse scores. There's no way to know.

My gut feeling is that ARC doesn’t play as big of a role in the Chinese model manufacturer landscape. It’s one byproduct but China is focusing on resource efficiency (for political reasons and low compute). So unlike OpenAI, poor performance on ARC doesn’t hurt as much if the model works well. OpenAI literally hinges on hype so the insane economic bets they make somehow pay off. If you have billions and the future of the company on the line, you ace the exam any way you can. We noticed this early on that whenever some dataset of ARC was released suddenly the classes of problems in that dataset GPT would do well on. But it just doesn’t generalise. They fine tune like crazy. I bet they fine tune for raspberry counting at this point. Again, for OpenAI the perception of moat is everything! Keep that in mind

Re: Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

#130

Post by scotty79 »

sho wrote: post #8

I am no-where near as concerned by this as I was a year ago, when I was expecting the axe to fall at any moment before the Chinese labs achieved some sort of escape velocity. I now think it's too late, all the cats are out of all the bags, there's no moat except maybe a temporal one of a few months, the genie is out of the bottle. There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have so…

> There is no secret sauce the US labs have that the Chinese ones don't, or won't have soon enough.

Over last year it seems that the only thing US labs are ahead is money spent. At least half of technical innovations if not more came from Chinese labs and was published openly.

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