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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

#191

Post by saberience »

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.

It's absolutely NOT a moat. Making a harness is the EASY part.

If you had said "marketing is a moat" then yes, I would say you were right. But creating a harness equal to or better than Claude Code is trivial. The CC harness is actually shit. There are tons of open-source harnesses than work better than CC while using Opus via OpenRouter.

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

#192

Post by DCKing »

KronisLV wrote: post #179
DCKing wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deepseek V4 came out three weeks ago: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro Kimi K2.5 has also been superseded by a finer tuned Kimi K2.6 three weeks ago. Moonshot's Kimi models appear to be the favored Chinese model, at least for coding, and not Deepseek V4. z.AI's GLM 5.1 is also worth mentioning as rather competent for coding, also released in April. Those models too will not be beating US AI labs by…

Also they have a pretty big token discount running this month: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ Even without the discount, I'll have to think about whether I need the 100 EUR tier of Anthropic Max, or whether downgrading to Pro and using DeepSeek is good enough. And they're also up on OpenRouter and other places. Been using those models, not quite comparable with Opus 4.6/4.7 but with max reasoning,…

I've been using OpenCode Go ($10/month) for personal projects (I have Claude subscription for $DAYJOB) and for the tinkering around that I do for myself the quality of the open weight models and the limits of the OpenCode plan are sufficient. I agree that for a lot of dev tasks they're quite good!

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

#193

Post by gruez »

energy123 wrote: post #98
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…

They're not even that much cheaper (1/2 price per task according to Artificial Analysis) once you account for lower token usage of GPT-5.5. I can't justify it when factoring in the extra time wasted, and the cheap codex usage I get through the monthly plan. Frontier intelligence is not a commodity product ... yet.

The price per task already factors in token usage so you're double counting if you're also tacking "higher token usage" as another argument on top

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

#194

Post by doctorwho42 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #40
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…

And yet Claude six months ago was amazing and good enough for you. This shows that AI cloud consumption is just a conspicuous consumption status symbol, nobody knows why they need cloud AI or what problem they are even solving.

Ah, AI is running off of the highway model, induced demand. That kind of makes a lot of sense now that I think about it.

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

#195

Post by stavros »

KronisLV wrote: post #179
DCKing wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deepseek V4 came out three weeks ago: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro Kimi K2.5 has also been superseded by a finer tuned Kimi K2.6 three weeks ago. Moonshot's Kimi models appear to be the favored Chinese model, at least for coding, and not Deepseek V4. z.AI's GLM 5.1 is also worth mentioning as rather competent for coding, also released in April. Those models too will not be beating US AI labs by…

Also they have a pretty big token discount running this month: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing/ Even without the discount, I'll have to think about whether I need the 100 EUR tier of Anthropic Max, or whether downgrading to Pro and using DeepSeek is good enough. And they're also up on OpenRouter and other places. Been using those models, not quite comparable with Opus 4.6/4.7 but with max reasoning,…

I've been using Deepseek 4 Pro (instead of Sonnet 4.6) as the developer LLM (Opus is the planner) and it's been great. Not super fast, with all the reasoning, but has been writing good code, and I think I paid $5 so far (whereas with Sonnet I'd have run out of the weekly limits on Max for weeks now).

Definitely recommended, though it's crucial that you have GPT 5.5 review the code afterwards.

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

#196

Post by doctorwho42 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #141
repelsteeltje wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which, in itself, is a major crack that AI has caused in the delicate foundation of our technological society.

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

#197

Post by HKH2 »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #171
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universities are struggling to prevent their students using AI, because it makes both learning and evaluation extremely difficult.

This. It's extremely frustrating, AI can be a 24/7 tutor, but too many students use it to do their work instead. We have to really rethink how and what we teach, and how we evaluate. Scoring (non-handwritten) homework is pointless, even contra-productive (because it incentivizes cheating, even for the students who don't want to, just to not be outscored by the cheaters). Hand-written homework means the students at le…

They can just get plotters to write their homework for them.

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

#198

Post by Our_Benefactors »

joefourier wrote: post #181
sho wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree with you, but I've been convinced over the last year that it's a time and scale issue, not anything fundamental. The Chinese models right now are in a weird spot. Compared to the frontiers, both their pre and post training is woeful - tiny, resource constrained in every dimension including human, slow. I'd compare it to OpenAI 5 years ago except I think even then OpenAI had way more! But they "cheat" qui…

> I'd compare it to OpenAI 5 years ago except I think even then OpenAI had way more! Say what? 5 years ago OpenAI had received around $139 million in funding, and they’d just come out with GPT3 with 175B parameters, a 2048 context window, trained on 300B tokens on a 10,000 V100 cluster which would have cost maybe $4-13 million at the time for their training run. Meanwhile Deepseek V3’s famously frugal training was $5…

> Meanwhile Deepseek V3’s famously frugal training was $5M

And widely derided once the team was unable to provide receipts. It’s more likely to be 10x

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

#199

Post by moffkalast »

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 would agree, the only thing Kimi is really missing is stability and harness training, For general chat tasks I consider it mostly on par. Occasionally I'll give the same problem to Kimi, Claude, GPT, Gemini and it's not unusual to see Kimi correctly figure out some kind of weird extra thing that the others missed, like some kind of mentally unstable savant.

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

#200

Post by doctorwho42 »

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.

So instead, we are building data centers for capacity we aren't sure exists...

Data centers that are orders of magnitude more resource intensive than anything than came before. Hell there is one planned for Utah that I saw would consume 2x the power of the states current usage, which would there by triple a single states power usage overnight.

Tell me how that is somehow more efficient?

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