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OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

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Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#311

Post by SR2Z »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #289
byzantinegene wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is still quite far from monopolizing hardware production

Can you buy a laptop or phone not made in china, not made from parts from china? At a regular store not some weird nerd laptop for normies.

Can you buy a good laptop without parts controlled by the US?

China has mastered lower parts of the value chain, but the most advanced and profitable ones (chips, turbines, frontier models) are solidly dominated by the US and its allies.

That might change, but when? The demographic and economic advantages that helped China rise quickly are exhausted. The Chinese economy is struggling to unwind the property bubble and manage a huge amount of surplus production that can no longer be sold to the US. The country is shrinking in population. Urbanization, which was previously a sure fire way to achieve growth, is now at ~70%, compared to the US' 80%.

It seems unlikely that China will be able to fully supplant the rest of the world unless the government relinquishes its tight control of the economy. There's just not enough centrally-plannable growth left.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#312

Post by adventured »

SR2Z wrote: post #311
NegativeLatency wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you buy a laptop or phone not made in china, not made from parts from china? At a regular store not some weird nerd laptop for normies.

Can you buy a good laptop without parts controlled by the US? China has mastered lower parts of the value chain, but the most advanced and profitable ones (chips, turbines, frontier models) are solidly dominated by the US and its allies. That might change, but when? The demographic and economic advantages that helped China rise quickly are exhausted. The Chinese economy is struggling to unwind the property bubble and…

Most likely it'll bifurcate.

The US will be (is) forced to work with everyone not named China or Russia, to ensure it can compete with China's concentrated industrial might. That means making iPhones in India, or Mexico, or Vietnam. That means Micron building more RAM production domestically. It should mean helping ASML stay out in front of China's incoming silicon wave. And so on.

It'll be China + allies vs the US + allies. It's going to be intense and very expensive. A huge amount of global manufacturing has to be built up outside of China.

And China does indeed have enormous problems brewing, including a staggering 5x increase in homelessness in just roughly seven years (to go with its collapsed housing market):

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/01/14/beijing-b...

Over the next 20-30 years robotics + AI will brutalize countries with very large populations when it comes to employment, especially those that depend on volume manufacturing heavily to absorb labor. The US for its part should be focused on rapidly shrinking its population, pushing up-skill, restricting immigration based on points (ala Canada et al.), and focusing entirely on quality of life / standard of living per capita as the population declines (let it happen rather than fighting the big trend, boost GDP per capita via robotics + AI, higher productivity).

I'd want to be a small, decently well educated, high functioning nation, with powerful military friends, and far from China. Estonia perhaps (Russia poses no serious terminal threat to them so long as NATO exists or a European alternative). Poland has some cultural mojo right now as well, they could be interesting over the next few decades.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#313

Post by Gigachad »

brookst wrote: post #296
Gigachad wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Distillation attacks", and it's just the exact same thing they did to the rest of the web and all human works.

Explain “exact same thing”? Like it load the Wikipedia page for Fort Worth, Texas, does it make Wikipedia spin up an editor to go write the article? I’m really not sure how you’re getting “exact” here.

Anthropic scraped the whole web, scanned every book, pirated every bit of media to feed in to their training. Distillers are doing essentially the same thing scraping all the knowledge from the LLM to create a training set for a new one.

They are crying about theft after committing the largest theft in human history.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#314

Post by spider-mario »

adastra22 wrote: post #214
kingstnap wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think of LLMs as programs. The weights and inference code are very much a binary. While the training code and data are the true source. Since if you want to robustly modify the LLM that's actually what you need. But since "compilation" (training) is extremely compute intensive this isn't something accessible to anyone without an entire datacenter. Anyway semantics aside having the binary is still infinitely be…

That’s not how it works though. Two training runs on the same data don’t produce the same weights. And if you want to modify the AI, you do so by fine tuning the weights not rerunning training. In every respect that matters, the weights are both the binary and the source code together.

Two builds of the same source code don’t always produce exactly the same binary either, but we don’t use that as an excuse to distribute object files and call it open-source.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#315

Post by hamandcheese »

kgwgk wrote: post #114
inexcf wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty weird when the moon is as much between earth and sun as the earth is between the moon and the sun.

And when it’s in between we cannot even see it (unless it’s exactly in line).

And when it’s in between we cannot even see it (when it’s exactly in line).

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#316

Post by victor9000 »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #22
victor9000 wrote: post #15

What good does a temporary price reduction do for production workloads? I'm not even running evals on something that is not long-term sustainable.

Do you have guarantees that the price of the model you’re using in production today won’t increase in the future?

Yes, they haven't advertised a pending price jump in the near future.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#317

Post by riversflow »

raincole wrote: post #286
adastra22 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how it works though. Two training runs on the same data don’t produce the same weights. And if you want to modify the AI, you do so by fine tuning the weights not rerunning training. In every respect that matters, the weights are both the binary and the source code together.

By this standard there is no closed source software on PC. You can always modify the binary directly or hook your functions in.

Wouldn’t any software that is a client and relies on a proprietary server to function (like most modern AAA games) be “closed source” under this definition? Not that I agree with this definition of open source btw, just saying that there is precedent.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#318

Post by ACCount37 »

truncate wrote: post #280
giwook wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd still have strong models without distillation, but strong enough to challenge frontier models and to claim the meaningful market share that they have? Probably not.

Or, they can figure out something else out? I recall couple years ago when China didn't have enough GPUs (still don't?), DeepSeek team figured out how to train with less computing. IIRC they made Mixture of Experts mainstream and made really optimized kernels and clever use of PTX instruction set.

"China does it in a cave with a box of scraps" is a myth. Chinese labs play the shell game to get their hands on a lot of compute outside China.

Tricks like distillation save compute in the RL leg of the process - where a lot of the frontier labs puts their own training run compute.

Re: OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

#319

Post by Paradigma11 »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #227
Paradigma11 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate the mechanisms by which a LLM would know what model it is.

ask it what type of model it is or what it's name is... it's weird that Kimi will say it's claude...

Unless it is specifically instructed in the system prompt it will give you the most likely answer, which is Claude. If there are instructions in the system prompt it will give the correct answer, which would be Kimi. Or are you suggesting that Kimi is copy pasting Claudes system prompt?
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