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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

#21

Post by trollbridge »

BrtByte wrote: post #14
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 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

But a “good enough” lamp just got a lot cheaper. The cost of tokens on DeepSeek V4 Pro is so low I don’t even think about and currently am trying to figure out useful things for as many agents simultaneously running as I can. What would have cost $150 less than a year ago now costs 35¢.

Likewise Qwen 3.6 absolutely blows me away and that’s on a 35b 6-bit model on a local 5090. Same thing, busy trying to find stuff to do to keep it busy 24/7.

I can still find some niches for Opus 4.7 but being able to attack problems and not worry about consumption is a game changer.

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

#22

Post by gpt5 »

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 seek 3.2 is 4% on Arc-AGI 2 [1], while GPT 5.2 high is 52% and GPT 5.5 pro high is 84.6%. That's the real reason why nobody is using these models for serious work. It's incredibly frustrating.

In addition, I already feel the pain myself on the model restriction. I'll asking my codex 5.5 agent to crawl a website - BOOM, cybersecurity warning on my account. I'll ask it to fix SSH on my local network - another warning. I'm worried about the day my account would be randomly banned and I cannot create a new one. OpenAI already asks you to perform full identification in order to eliminate these warnings - probably exactly for that - so that if they ban you, it's permanent.

[1] https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

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

#23

Post by BrtByte »

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.

If the second-best lamp is 90% as good and 10x cheaper, most people will use the second-best lamp...

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

#24

Post by jorvi »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #12
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Affordability of hardware that can run local LLMs is a real factor, too. Not sure when RAM prices are going down, but with everything that’s happening and can happen in the world right now, it doesn’t look like it’ll drop in the near or medium-term

No one is going to run models that are comparable to frontier locally without spending enormous sums for use at scale or in large orgs. Even with cheap RAM, you will still need a very large budget for frontier-level capability. Open models that are competitive with frontier will be used on shared hosts.

Models have been capped out on training and (active) parameters a while ago, its tooling / harness that is making the big jumps in performance happen. And then you have things like DeepSeek with a pretty small KV cache.

And with the extreme chip shortages for the next two years, there's little appetite for even bigger models anyway.

Barring a breakthrough in scaling, the only direction the models can really go is smaller. Which will inevitably mean better performing local models for same chip budget.

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

#26

Post by shevy-java »

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

This is not just about mainland China though. The current US government is extremely selfish and self-centered. Other countries really need to consider for their own long-term situation here.

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

#27

Post by vasachi »

fwipsy wrote: post #18
vasachi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used DeepSeek 4 Pro through Claude. It’s fine. Plans are similar to what sonnet/opus make. Same massage-the-plan -> massage-the-code loop. Maybe the code is a bit worse, but that’s the “months behind” thing. The thing is, vast majority of code tasks aren’t a venture into the unknown. We as an industry for the most part build CRUD interfaces and dashboards. That can be achieved, with supervision, with frontier op…

I think maybe you are both right. Perhaps AI coding assistants just don't need to be all that smart in many cases, so open weights models are fine. At the same time, frontier models are advancing in other domains, like mathematics, where raw intelligence is a more important factor.

I can’t compare raw intelligence of these models, and I certainly can’t say anything about their advances in mathematics (without repeating press releases). But, erm, does it really matter? It’s not like some engineer somewhere will vibe-calculate how much weight a bridge can hold.

Well, yes, someone probably will do that. But I’m pretty sure there will be consequences for the engineer errors in this vibe-calculations.

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

#28

Post by partloyaldemon »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #15
zelon88 wrote: post #2

> And it doesn’t stop with the security questions: the Trump administration’s signature style of international engagement is to wield American leverage as a bundle. Deadlocks in trade negotiations are broken by threatening to withhold intelligence, tech deals are stalled by reference to food safety standards. And so I don’t know when a U.S. administration would choose to leverage its seemingly inevitable predeploymen…

[flagged]

You can be a greedy pig and be an idiot simultaneously. You can see how those two things might even be correlated, no?

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

#29

Post by avazhi »

BrtByte wrote: post #23
jorvi wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the second-best lamp is 90% as good and 10x cheaper, most people will use the second-best lamp...

That’s what he said?

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

#30

Post by ares623 »

I wonder if the countries that don't have "AI Sovereignty" end up being like what Japan is now, technologically. It's stuck in 90's/early 2000's tech and norms (i.e. left behind) but its infrastructure and society chugs along (the demographic problem is a separate issue).

Would that make those countries more attractive to young people perhaps? As a place to grow and learn skills where the opportunities are non-existent in the AI Sovereign countries.

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