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When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

tomtunguz.com

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Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#61

Post by est31 »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #50
seasox wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.

I wonder if they ever will be. If the chinese open source models are only 3-6 months behind every major frontier model release, I can't see the business model. GLM-5.2 is supposedly on par to Opus depending on the case. And everybody and their mother can run that model in their datacenter and charge Dollars for tokens.

There is distillation going on where chinese providers give the model lots of outputs. We don't live in a world where chinese providers are not doing this so we can't compare the advantage of this distillation, but there is some advantage to it otherwise they wouldn't do it.

If Anthropic can block distillations somehow (which are fair game imo given that Anthropic et al did the same with the written works of mankind), then they might stop or slow down the chinese from catching up.

Chinese also have like 40% of the AI researchers of the world, plus they have access to a lot of cheap labour for writing training data. I'm sure an hour of training data creation from one of China's 162 million university educated people is much cheaper than an hour of work from one of US's 97 million. Probably still cheaper than someone from the grand area.

China is behind in AI chips/GPUs but they are catching up. One thing where they have a hard dependence on outside is their energy imports: they have to import a lot of stuff from third party countries. The US on the other hand is energy self sufficient.

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#63

Post by nerbert »

jonatron wrote: post #62
geon wrote: post #2

Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.

Apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?

Grape and aspergus, we all get it

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#65

Post by arrowsmith »

jonatron wrote: post #62
geon wrote: post #2

Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.

Apples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?

Maybe an ESL thing? "Potatoes" are literally called "earth apples" in some languages (e.g. pommes de terre in French; Erdäpfel in some German dialects.)

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#67

Post by _pdp_ »

Even if the current generation of frontier models becomes 10x cheaper, companies will still end up spending much more per employee than they do today.

Lower prices will not reduce AI spend. They will simply increase usage.

There is no real ceiling on how much companies can delegate to AI. The only limit is the floor where spend too little, and you simply stop being competitive.

Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer

#70

Post by littlecranky67 »

est31 wrote: post #61
littlecranky67 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they ever will be. If the chinese open source models are only 3-6 months behind every major frontier model release, I can't see the business model. GLM-5.2 is supposedly on par to Opus depending on the case. And everybody and their mother can run that model in their datacenter and charge Dollars for tokens.

There is distillation going on where chinese providers give the model lots of outputs. We don't live in a world where chinese providers are not doing this so we can't compare the advantage of this distillation, but there is some advantage to it otherwise they wouldn't do it. If Anthropic can block distillations somehow (which are fair game imo given that Anthropic et al did the same with the written works of mankind)…

Stopping distilation is a condradiction to growth: The more active users Anthropic gets, the easier it will be for chinese companies to distile the model. Heck, I can see a paid browser extension being issued that does nothing but send copies of your AI chatbox prompts+results to China - with a "hidden" feature that creates distillation prompts every now and then. Give each 5$ a month for installing the browser extension, and you got an unstoppable distillation botnet.
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