Comment by cosmic_cheese
4 days ago
It seems like it’s really only China that’s pursuing the route of doing more with smaller/cheaper models, too, which also has a lot of potential to give the whole bubble a good shake.
To me it seems like the most obvious thing to do. More efficient models both make up for whatever you lost by using cheaper hardware and let you do more with the hardware you have than the competition can. By comparison the ever-growing-model strategy is a dead end.
I think you might be underestimating the use of small models in proprietary systems. The progress from China is very visible because it's very open, but the big tech companies are doing this too for cost savings.