The Flat Curve Society

National Security! Selling to the government. Getting tax dollars for something the public will not be able to evaluate. All deals are behind closed doors. Undisturbed grift for all involved.

He's one of the chief hallucinators, show some respect.

> And since most companies aren’t going to want to send their code and problems to the model vendors, I think the world will learn to live with the models we do have access to.

I guess what Steve is saying is that we don't need all of these data centers then! In his picture he paints a bleak world where, just outside, pollution seems to be the norm. Maybe this is a new rendition of Animal Farm he's working on?

I do agree with him, though... I don't think most companies will want to send their code to OAI, Anthropic or Google either. Not because they can't afford it or are worried about that being stolen (Steve: the point is rarely the code, it's the customer base) but more because they're starting to wake up to the snake oil AI market. Always has been and always will be when you're hocking a subjective and non-deterministic product! We've seen this time and time again within the cyber security space and, well look at that, now the problem space for AI has achieved global charlatanism!

Does it have value? For sure. It does. But it's also not "nuclear weapons" level. OAI was just putting out roulette porn last week yet now we're here? This is all another "hacking tool" strawman that the USG loves to run around with like Chicken Little.

Finally, speaking of the USG. Those in power absolutely love this. Why? Because the USG has always destroyed what could have been great platforms by scope creeping them into mediocrity. Look at the F-35 (JSF). It a mediocre airframe because it had very different requirements for every branch of the military. Just the same way LLMs are not useful for 80% of the enterprise. Nobody gives two shits about a chatbot that can write a haiku. They want a platform that can solve specific problems. Do we really think the enterprise is dumb enough to think that they should redirect a significant spend into LLMs just to be in the exact same position as their competitor? Rewind the clock and start with SLMs and you'd see a much more palatable AI market right now. But instead we're trying to hit an impossible target through brute force and raw dollars. Not through strategic tact but wasteful and egregious weaponization of money that's flowing to some of the most narcissistic people on the face of the earth.

Not only that, but it also relies on assumption that everything that LLM does cannot be factored into small reasoning core (something like Lean or Prolog, but in more modal/fuzzy logic) plus knowledge base (like Wikipedia).

It then raises a question, which of these two is really the precious thing. (Although there could be a 3rd thing, a memoization of some shortcuts, like tautologies in logic.)

> It's not the models, it's the harnesses and the result automation possibilities that are the true unlock. LLMs stabilizing around a current local maximum is actually not much of a big deal. If we just use the models we have today there is so much more unlock available.

This. And we don't even need LLMs. Orchestrated SLMs that are actually good at their topical areas of training (imagine that) are more in-tune with what the enterprise wants.

> The real danger is how big of a gap will exist once the curve does level off.

I think we've seen that is has. Parlor tricks like what Anthropic is pulling with Fable / Mythos is ultimately a cheat. Basically what you describe up top: the harnesses and underlying automation built in - and that's exactly what Anthropic didn't tell people Fable was, yet it is. And here we are. Is Fable amazing without Claude Code under the covers? Probably not much outside Opus 4.8. The models themselves aren't accelerating as fast as they were years ago, but the marketing clankers have kicked in and are pushing out benchmarks and numbers and all the things, but in reality they're fractions of a point improved. And they still get the obvious things wrong, even when you're paying the inflated high prices. I just can't wait until Anthropic tells everyone that API access to a model is "dangerous", because you know damn well that's coming. There's no moat unless they keep digging. And they're digging right now, that's very clear.