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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

#141

Post by zozbot234 »

repelsteeltje wrote: post #133
nojs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Today's B200 clusters are tomorrow's e-waste.

Hardware depreciation timescales are actually getting longer, not shorter, because frontier hardware like B200 clusters is highly bottlenecked. It's not just a RAMpocalypse out there, we're seeing early signs of production bottlenecks with GPUs and maybe even CPUs.

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

#142

Post by krautburglar »

petesergeant wrote: post #48
nubg wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of what he said was false? Dario Amodei and especially Sam Altman have been treating the general public like cattle. And goy simply means non-Jew, how can not talking about Jews be anti-Semitic?!

Using “goy” as a stand-in for — say — “plebs” is the anti-Semitic piece, because it implies that Jews treat non-Jews as lesser, discriminate against them, and that’s it’s common enough as to be standard usage. I am willing to believe op doesn’t know Amodei is Jewish, hadn’t thought through the implications (even if Amodei wasn’t), and didn’t mean anything by it, but it’s not just a harmless phrase for “commoners”

Altman and Amodei are both a) nasty pieces of work, b) bona fide jews of matrilineal descent, & c) treat damn near everyone as "outsiders" (i.e. goyim), so use of the word goyim is a component of the truth. You are criticizing and policing the truth. In the short-run, truth can be buried. In the long-run, it always wins. So keep shoveling. We can wait.

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

#143

Post by irthomasthomas »

gpt5 wrote: post #22
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…

I wish it was true. I would gladly use a GPT 5.2 high model equivalent for coding (6 months old) if it was offered cheaper by Deepseek or Kimi. And I'm sure that's an extremely prevalent opinion by the millions of Claude and Codex users who are bothered by the costs. However, they just don't perform that well in practice. That's the real issue. You can actually see it when you move away from open benchmarks. Deep see…

Arc has no predictive power whatsoever. I always use the best models available. So far I haven't found a task that chineses models cannot solve very quickly and reasonably. Do you have any examples where they failed for you?

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

#145

Post by nayroclade »

ehnto wrote: post #95
coderenegade wrote: post #5

The distillation risk has been brewing for a while now. In a very real sense, the model is the data, so if the data is locked down because of how valuable it is, it was only a matter of time before fully open access to the models would be revoked. There's also an additional economic concern that rarely gets mentioned: because no one has cracked continual learning, keeping models up-to-date and filling in gaps in perf…

They are also not getting the same quantity or quality of data as was possible in the first years of "ingest". Compared to the beginning, from here on it is more like a drip feed of new training data. Still immense volumes of data, but we are talking 1 year of data production from society versus centuries of text and data ingested in a short time frame.

For pre-training, yes. But for post-training you need high-quality labelled datasets for reinforcement learning. So far AI has been most successful in coding, because you can translate the usage into such datasets, and thus produce a virtuous cycle: More usage produces more data, which produces better models, which drives more usage.

The question is whether this same model can successfully be applied in disciplines like medicine, law, engineering, etc.

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

#146

Post by yorwba »

zozbot234 wrote: post #137
yorwba wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

I expect every company to try to make a model as good as they possibly can, especially now that Mythos has served as a proof of concept to demonstrate that there's lots of interest in AI for cybersecurity. But if they don't try, that hardly assuages concerns about not being able to access the very best models, does it?

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

#148

Post by baq »

lugu wrote: post #87
baq wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it seems that 90% are happily paying for the marginal 10% capability and saturate datacenters.

That is called marketing.

not necessarily. it might just as well be 'time is money'.

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

#149

Post by cubefox »

tirpen wrote: post #122
cubefox wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If the methodology in the accompanying write-up did look credible, yes. Though I have significantly more trust in US agencies, like NIST in this case.

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

#150

Post by dmantis »

I hope regular people will stop using "national security" and "national interests" as euphemisms and framing, and will call these things a psychopathic fight for power.

Assuming that some humans are worse than others because of their flag picture and that they deserve less access to resources is barbarism. There is no security in limiting access to NSA-style entities; it's an absolute insecurity for everyone but them throughout the whole world. How is that in anyone's "interests"?

We see every day now how suspicious bugs that look exactly like backdoors (i.e., Microsoft BitLocker) get exposed. That's in humanity's interests (and those of particular nations as a subset) — not being subjugated by small rings of professional outlaws. We need these instruments to defend people, everywhere. We don't need to give a leverage to any state psycho. Let's make everyone of them weaker.

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