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

writing.antonleicht.me

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

#131

Post by PunchyHamster »

hbarka wrote: post #43
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…

Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.

The industry on tooling have been very much moving in direction of "plug the AI of your choosing" for a while now, and given how much Anthropic fights the 3rd party tools they are definitely afraid to be left in the dust.

> just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.

It's hard to change OS. It's not hard to jump from one AI tool to another

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

#132

Post by zozbot234 »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #129
energy123 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True, ARC is mostly an artificial "human-like AGI" benchmark that doesn't really reflect any plausible workload. Very different from things like Humanity's Last Exam that reflect real-world knowledge and are now getting closer and closer to saturation even with open models.

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

#133

Post by repelsteeltje »

nojs wrote: post #74
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…

What about access to GPUs and memory? This is becoming a pretty major bottleneck.

Today's tech echoes 1960-1970 mainframe era: very centralized around a handful of companies controlling "massive cloud compute" in bespoke mainframe-like topology.

All of that will all be legacy in a couple of years. Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste. Decentralization might happen gradually or abruptly. But to me it's obvious that we'll be thinking of high-tech tensor processors and GPUs the way we thought of individual transistors and tube amplifiers in the 1980s.

If AI turns out to be the revolution it purports to be, than the underlying hardware will change much more rapidly than it did with ICs and microprocessors in the late 1970s. Today's hot is tomorrow's junk.

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

#134

Post by littleparrot »

asdff wrote: post #78
nojs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about access to GPUs and memory? This is becoming a pretty major bottleneck.

Everyone is expecting them to invade Taiwan, but why not merely extort Taiwan?

You mean by contributing to RAMpocalypse the mainland incentives the west to build own fabs, making Taiwan expendable for us someday?

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

#135

Post by rightbyte »

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…

It is way better than some years ago but like every scene got something strange. Look closely. Look at them throwing shoes at 55s if you want something really obvious.

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

#136

Post by sublimefire »

> margins shrink and become razor-thin

You need to understand that these models are provided by the corporate entities, they are expensive to maintain, iterate and run. There is still no strong correlation between the use of AI and the business outcomes so there should be a real ceiling to how much enterprises would pay for tokens. The gov is a usual choice to establish contracts and get some stability, similar to building nuclear reactors or military equipment. And posturing about limiting model access is just saying it is expensive to subsidise its use for cat image generation or call summaries.

I am pretty sure we have not found the killer app (like an IDE even) for us to extract all the possible value from the models yet. I would even go as far as to say that the synthesis between a human and AI could leverage average models to achieve a lot more compared to the model/agent working on its own.

edit: Just to add to this, I am going through Mythos scans and it is not perfect, very much similar to what pentesters would do with the added bloat of noise in reports about nonissues.

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

#137

Post by zozbot234 »

yorwba wrote: post #128
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. (T…

> 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?

They aren't trying to become that good, nor do they need to in order to have real positive impact. Models like Mythos are estimated to be humongous even on a datacenter-wide scale, which is actually a big factor in its limited availability at present. It's mostly helpful as a one-of-a-kind proof of concept, to answer the question of whether AI can still plausibly scale by growing capabilities and what happens to alignment concerns when you do that.

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

#138

Post by zozbot234 »

littleparrot wrote: post #134
asdff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is expecting them to invade Taiwan, but why not merely extort Taiwan?

You mean by contributing to RAMpocalypse the mainland incentives the west to build own fabs, making Taiwan expendable for us someday?

Mainland China is growing its own RAM manufacturing capacity. They are too tiny to make a real dent into the RAMpocalypse yet but this can potentially change.

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

#139

Post by m_mueller »

zozbot234 wrote: post #96
PAndreew wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to feel like a parrot, but people seem to forget that software engineering is actually a very narrow slice of the white collar pie. You don't need a mega-model which can reason about 100 000 lines of code when you want to create a nice PPT (which consumed literally hours of your life before) to impress your boss. SOTA models will probably be used for frontier research, complex coding tasks, large scale d…

Creating a nice PPT is actually hard because it requires visual capabilities and so-called "computer use" (really, GUI use) of fiddly proprietary software. The nice thing about the coding case compared to a lot of disparate white-collar work is that it's all plain ASCII text. You can already ask a coding model to create a nice TeX/beamer slideshow (or whatever the Typst-based equivalent is) but whether your boss will…

Tangential, but in our opinion corporate PPTX automation is an unsolved problem, even with Claude for PowerPoint (and it's worse with everything else common out there). Its harness (a) is not tuned very well for corporate use and (b) even if it were, fails to manage the specific business knowledge within each org needed to create effective (i.e. audience tailored) presentations.

I've just written a blog post about this topic this week: https://octigen.com/blog/posts/2026-05-11-ai-presentation-ga...

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

#140

Post by dabinat »

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 thing that’s always missing from videos like this is how much prompting or manual editing it took. It’s always implied that it was a one-shot, when it almost certainly was not.
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