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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

#61

Post by baq »

ElFitz wrote: post #54
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…

> The only genuine moat the frontier labs have is their product take-up And even then, their is no stickiness. For most use cases there isn’t much value in one frontier model over the other. Just have to look at the people flocking from one to the other for whatever reason.

I’m flocking from GPT to opus every week for the past 3 months and always come back.

The point isn’t that gpt is better, it’s that it is so much better for my work it isn’t even sticky, it’s reinforced concrete. I use opus 1% of the time because it writes better and it’s sticky there.

Yes I’ll switch approximately immediately if opus or Gemini (which I use more than opus!) is better for what I do, but at this point frontier model tokens are not fungible.

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

#62

Post by baq »

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.

And yet it seems that 90% are happily paying for the marginal 10% capability and saturate datacenters.

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

#63

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

You can batch requests when running locally too, if you're using a model with low-enough requirements for KV-cache; essentially targeting the same resource efficiencies that the big providers rely on. This is useful since it gives you more compute throughput "for free" during decode, even when running on very limited hardware.

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

#64

Post by baq »

terrib1e wrote: post #4

No mention of open weights anywhere in the piece, which is weird. Qwen, Llama, DeepSeek are months behind frontier, not years. If you're a European startup worried about getting cut off from Anthropic's API in 2027, the real question is what the open-weight frontier looks like then. Probably pretty capable. That undercuts most of the doom scenario. Also, he concedes Mythos-level capabilities will be cheap next year,…

Open weights will remain open only if they’re significantly worse than the frontier weights.

Before you challenge with benchmarks, consider the labs which release open weight models have internal testing and unpublished results.

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

#65

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

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

#66

Post by Animats »

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=4zTCLIhScCM

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

#67

Post by Terr_ »

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]

> to question

That's a weird way to characterize months of incessant "we have incontrovertible hard evidence but you can't see it yet" claims, which--when finally forced into the light--were laughed out of every court in the nation.

If it was just pure and innocent "questioning", things would be very different. We probably wouldn't have had the January 6th mob attack on Congress, for example.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by _diyar »

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…

> Can you find any flaws

Physics.

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