Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one is getting fired for using SotA.
If the price difference is 2x? Sure. If the price difference is 50x? No way.
Laughs in 2005-era VMWare and EMC...
The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
91–100 of 195 posts
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#92The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…
Google already owns the app layer, and hardware, and they are a frontier-level AI research firm. I don't see how Anthropic or OpenAI survives being eaten by DeepSeek et al from the bottom of the stack and Google from the top.
Anthropic is at least renting their datacenters, not owning, so all the capital accounting bullshit is getting laundered by someone else, who will wind up holding that bag.
And Anthropic is currently cornering the enterprise coding market, and they were smart to avoid video. Under current economic conditions they're a lot closer to being profitable than anyone else, and they can take advantage of crashing prices for compute if we hit a datacenter-buildout-glut.
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#93Where's a few good places to go to learn more about open weight models, both running hosted and running locally?
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#94The government is going to ban foreign models and foreign inference providers, without question. The US govt is going to dig its dirty little fingers into OAI/Anthropic/Oracle/(probably)SpaceX and end up taking some stock for a sovereign wealth fund (probably timed to prop up flagging share prices, and with the promise of sweet government grift down the line), and at that point the bans will be framed as protecting that investment.
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#95One issue I keep seeing with cost comparisons is that they compare API rates while a substantial fraction of users are on subscription plans.
It's more expensive to use GLM 5.2 paying z.ai or Opencode Zen API rates than it is to use Opus on a subscription plan. Both of those providers offer subscriptions priced favorably relative to their API rates, but only in what are effectively trial sizes.
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#96The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…
#1 isn't going to happen because we're actually data limited, not compute limited. You can throw all the compute in the world at bad data and it won't make a difference, but an undertrained model with perfect training data will absolutely slay.
#2 isn't going to happen, because these labs have shown they have limited app/design sense, and they also lack the industry connections and domain wisdom to execute.
The way things are actually going to go is that these labs will set up partnerships with huge biotech/engineering/etc firms, and do custom training/inference on specific tasks that promise to be wildly profitable with them, then take royalties on the creation in perpetuity. Why sell inference when you can partner with Pfizer to make a version of Ozempic that also makes people freaky jacked, or partner with Bectel to make a radically safer, more efficient Nuclear power plant?
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#97The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options: 1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities…
#1 isn't going to happen because we're actually data limited, not compute limited. You can throw all the compute in the world at bad data and it won't make a difference, but an undertrained model with perfect training data will absolutely slay. #2 isn't going to happen, because these labs have shown they have limited app/design sense, and they also lack the industry connections and domain wisdom to execute. The way t…
what is 'bad data' and 'perfect data' according to you?
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
#1 isn't going to happen because we're actually data limited, not compute limited. You can throw all the compute in the world at bad data and it won't make a difference, but an undertrained model with perfect training data will absolutely slay. #2 isn't going to happen, because these labs have shown they have limited app/design sense, and they also lack the industry connections and domain wisdom to execute. The way t…
what is 'bad data' and 'perfect data' according to you?
Worst possible bad data is where the data is orthogonal to the task, so increasing the data never provides information on the task. Perfect data is where the data exactly encapsulates the task being trained.
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#99I don’t get it. So many here are saying open weight models will kill the frontier labs. But open source and similar have tried to beat private companies everywhere all the time, and people still buy the best products even if great open source alternatives are available. Why wouldn’t this be the case for AI too?
I feel like this comment is just engagement farming, but I'll bite anyways there is a larger appetite for something like open source AI mostly b/c of price. we all know these labs have not figured out their pricing model, and we're all holding our breath out of fear of what the prices could be. also, if you consider that the only toll to knowledge work before was personal time, and now you need to pay $100s month jus…
ppl buy iphones over cheap android phones . android phones can do everything that an iphone does ( and better)
Re: The unbearable cheapness of open weight models
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buying all the RAM can't work forever. Scarcity increases prices, high prices increase supply, improves RAM R&D budgets, and forces users to find ways to economize around low RAM availability.
It doesn't need to work forever. You just need to delay your competitors long enough that you can IPO to great fanfare, and then leave retail investors holding the bag. Founders and big investors get to cash out, everyone else gets screwed.
I doubt that works today. Look at SpaceX the fanfare lasted 3 days before most of the insiders could offload to the retail bag holders. That AI company had the benefit of being attached to the largest technical moat.
The existing AI companies can't even prevent their moat from being distilled by the Chinese token reselling industry.