Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by kasey_junk » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:53 AM UTC

hbarka wrote: post #43

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…

Harness engineering is a moat. There’s user loyalty and reliance on the chassis that Claude is on, for example, just like there’s more market share by MacOS+WindowsOS over Linux Open Source.

I regularly switch between codex and Claude in the same sessions. I’d throw in other models if I could.

Data governance and enterprise sales is a moat. The harnesses aren’t.

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

#82

Post by pjc50 » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:54 AM UTC

evdubs wrote: post #6

What's the likelihood that universities eventually become open model providers?

Universities are struggling to prevent their students using AI, because it makes both learning and evaluation extremely difficult.

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

#83

Post by gpt5 » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:55 AM UTC

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #47

gpt5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see…

> Deep seek 3.2 is 4% on Arc-AGI 2 Why are you bringing up an outdated Chinese model from 6 months ago to compare to a US model from 6 months ago? The outdated Chinese model will have performance from ~12 months ago, obviously. But today's Chinese model DeepSeek 4 has performance not far from the US model 6 months ago; 46% compared to 52% from 5.2.

Because Deepseek 4.0 is not yet there, but the jump isn't expected to be large. Kimi 2.5 is there and is also scoring low.

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

#84

Post by margorczynski » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:57 AM UTC

digitaltrees wrote: post #31

The thing is, the open source models are are smart enough to do most work if the harness and orchestration is right. So even if the next gen model get locked behind monopoly pay walls build Real things in the real world and fight for a humane world

The availability of open models with such capabilities are based on the goodwill of the Chinese. And that might end eventually, especially that the matter is one decision of Xi and the party.

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

#85

Post by davesque » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:58 AM UTC

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…

> The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters.

Is it even though? Quantization and speculative decoding are improving the local AI story by leaps and bounds every month.

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

#86

Post by gpt5 » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

usernametaken29 wrote: post #76

gpt5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 see…

I worked extensively on ARC AGI before and one thing is SURE as hell. OpenAI and Gemini in particular use this as marketing material. You can correlate the benchmark release with stock price increase. They feed synthetic datasets of ARC into their models to boost the numbers. There is no doubt in my mind Gemini is no better than DeepSeek other than being specifically fine tuned for ARC AGI. Heck, they even say so and…

ARC-AGI isn't perfect, but it helps demonstrates the gap. I'm sure all companies optimize their models for this benchmark given its dominance.

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

#87

Post by lugu » Fri, May 15, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

baq wrote: post #62

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.

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

That is called marketing.

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

#88

Post by mc-serious » Fri, May 15, 2026, 8:00 AM UTC

Open-Source will handle access to models, someone will find a way. Security by obfuscation has never worked.

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

#89

Post by zozbot234 » Fri, May 15, 2026, 8:01 AM UTC

davesque wrote: post #85

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…

> The more fundamental bottleneck is not even the frontier models, it's the datacenters. Is it even though? Quantization and speculative decoding are improving the local AI story by leaps and bounds every month.

Speculative decoding is not that useful at scale, it's mostly about making local single-user inference faster. When you're batching multiple inferences together, that's already as fast as the verification you have to perform w/ speculative decoding.

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

#90

Post by piker » Fri, May 15, 2026, 8:01 AM UTC

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…

Still in the uncanny valley for me. Like watching AI the film. That said, it’s 3-minutes long and maintains the setting across many different angles, zoom levels, etc. pretty impressive.