Comment by BrtByte
9 hours ago
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
9 hours ago
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
But a “good enough” lamp just got a lot cheaper. The cost of tokens on DeepSeek V4 Pro is so low I don’t even think about and currently am trying to figure out useful things for as many agents simultaneously running as I can. What would have cost $150 less than a year ago now costs 35¢.
Likewise Qwen 3.6 absolutely blows me away and that’s on a 35b 6-bit model on a local 5090. Same thing, busy trying to find stuff to do to keep it busy 24/7.
I can still find some niches for Opus 4.7 but being able to attack problems and not worry about consumption is a game changer.
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.
That presumes that there is a linear scale that measures performance. This can be tested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model
Even assuming this holds, what utility you gain by the best models depend completely by your workload. If you have tasks that require performance 10 and DeepSeek has 9, you will gladly pay for SotA models.
And yet it seems that 90% are happily paying for the marginal 10% capability and saturate datacenters.
Happy to pay for? Or happy to spend other people's money on?
That is called marketing.
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If the second-best lamp is 90% as good and 10x cheaper, most people will use the second-best lamp...
That’s what he said?