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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

#151

Post by cubefox »

mordae wrote: post #121
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...

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

I believe logistic curves make no sense when you have Elo scores.

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

#153

Post by pu_pe »

pjerem wrote: post #101
pu_pe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems with that scenario: 1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model. In a scenario where you already have other major disadvantages (access to capital, labor), you might be outcompeted 2. Open models have been keeping pace very nicely, but they rely on distillation of frontier models. If the race gets really tight, this could be affected so that the tim…

> 1. Your European startup will be competing with others using a much better frontier model. If the small (and I'd even say, sometimes imperceptible) difference between Opus & DeepSeek v4 Pro is such a disadvantage for your startup, it's that your startup have an issue, not the LLM. At the end of the day, your startup is there to solve real problems and even before the LLMs, being fast at coding things have never bee…

The direction we are going suggests AI will also be used for marketing, sales, customer support and product vision.

Besides, if the difference between Opus and DeepSeek 4 is so small and imperceptible, you are missing the opportunity to launch a startup on your own and compete with Claude Code.

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

#154

Post by versteegen »

usernametaken29 wrote: post #76
gpt5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

I've also worked extensively on ARC AGI 1/2, and I mainly agree. Marketing and training. Performance of LLMs on ARC is most importantly a function of training on grid/table-like data. It doesn't have to be specifically synthetic ARC data though. Training an LLM to be better at perceiving grid-like arrangements of data in a spatial way like an image, rather than just tabular, is hugely useful for things outside of ARC benchmarks, though it's a narrow skill. Hence, I'm sure they do it. I want them to do that. I believe the labs when they say they didn't train specifically for ARC-AGI 1/2 (where did Google say otherwise? I don't see it). But it does not mean the models are getting better at general purpose reasoning. They were already plenty good enough at that. You can describe ARC images in words and reason about it using a level of intelligence LLMs have had for years: they're designed to be easy! LLMs just couldn't reason about image-like grids very well.

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

#155

Post by aurareturn »

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…

One thing that is potentially different this time is that Moore's Law has stopped scaling. Computers aren't getting smaller exponentially. They're getting bigger with multiple chips glued together to make up for Moore's Law.

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

#156

Post by duskdozer »

quink wrote: post #94
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…

And even if there weren’t any jarring errors, and rest assured there’s about a billion of them, there’s no appeal to this. It’s all context free short unassociated clips of pretty faces dancing on a beach. And? There’s no narrative, there’s now sense of reality, it’s just a sense of here’s a million pixels of colours that have proven to go well with each other, it’s _slop_. It’s been years and the only place AI has c…

Well it is an ad, and all ads need to do is pump their "brand" into your head, so it was always slop.

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

#157

Post by pu_pe »

davesque wrote: post #85
pu_pe wrote: post #53

The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters. Let's say Europe breaks apart from the US completely tomorrow. It does not have enough datacenters (or GPUs in general) to sustain its inference needs even if it would resort to Chinese open models. And to build new datacenters, it would need to source parts from the US and China. In other words, if AI does have continued significa…

> The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters. Is it even though? Quantization and speculative decoding are improving the local AI story by leaps and bounds every month.

There is "local AI" which is running on consumer grade hardware and "local AI" which still needs a datacenter (DeepSeek 4, GLM 4.7, etc). If you woke up tomorrow and could only use the latter you are about 6 months behind the frontier, if you have to rely on the former you are 2 or 3 years behind.

All these tricks like quantization and speculative decoding can also be used by the leading AI labs, which means they will simply have more compute than you at the end of the day. So far this has translated into better performance.

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

#160

Post by rsolva »

In our company of 24 employees, we get by with two DGX Sparks. We don't use AI heavily, but each Spark can serve about 6-8 concurrent requests with a full context lenght of 256k, which is decent. We get about ~35 t/s depending on the model we use (currently Qwen3.5 122B A10B and Qwen3 Coder Next), but we might set up a smaller model too for simpler tasks.

This works for us and will work for years to come. It is not SOTA, but it works darn well for our purposes, and we control the compute and data flowing through it, so totally worth it.

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