Comment by swalsh
21 hours ago
Open source models, especially qwen are pretty dang good. But its not opus 4.6, the evals dont tell the full story. I question the assumption open source models are 3-6 months out.
21 hours ago
Open source models, especially qwen are pretty dang good. But its not opus 4.6, the evals dont tell the full story. I question the assumption open source models are 3-6 months out.
Its not just about the quality of output, but you also can finetune them to proprietary needs, if the skillsets are their internally, to make them better without governance risks. So being SOTA doesn't matter as much, since generalized tasks are not what matter most to companies, its the specialization relative to business need or internal datasets.
To make an extreme comparison, desktop Linux was originally supposed to happen in 1999.
Maybe I misspoke by saying open source.
The larger point I'm making is I think models are rapidly becoming commoditized. There is probably a small market long term that's willing to pay 10x for 10% marginal gains, but the majority of the buyers in the market will be economic and we're likely to have a lot of folks willing to spend 1/10 the cost for 90% of the performance, and plenty of companies that haven't raised hundreds of billions-trillions who can provide that.
A lot of the frontier labs valuations has been based on an assumption that 1-2 companies would get break-away intelligence that basically made them economic chokepoints indefinitely into the future. The reality that's becoming increasingly clear is that model quality is a pretty linear function of (cash burned - ability to copy other's homework) and the economics are starting to look a lot more like airlines than online advertising.
Lets go one step further.
The economics of airlines are such that they generally earn a return on capital less than cost of capital.
I think this is exactly where we are heading and OAI-Anthropic are the concordes.