Comment by CuriouslyC
11 hours ago
There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.
The non-commodity network services of the early 1990’s and the non-commodity 3d graphics hardware of the mid-1990s made the same argument.
They didn’t have the security state backing up their business thesis at gunpoint.
I doubt that. What stops the Chinese labs from figuring it out? It’s not like these models are fundamentally different from each other
If all you have is the starting point and the finishing point, the lack of the path taken from one point to another limits your ability to train models that can efficiently recreate the work, and increases its cost enough that it's possible the US labs can progress capabilities faster than Chinese labs can distill that behavior.
As of this month, everyone has 100+ pages from Microsoft on how they trained their MAI-Thinking-1 model: https://microsoft.ai/pdf/mai-thinking-1.pdf
OpenAI and Anthropic may have gone silent on how they build their models, but other companies have different incentives.
This just looks like a capex problem. There is no evidence that Anthropic has secret sauce above and beyond access to capital. If there is secret sauce, it's unclear that it changes the required amount of capital by all that much.
China will spend all of the money required to catch up, Google and OpenAI will both spend money to catch up as well. NVidia and others will not allow a frontier lab to become the AI bottleneck.
> lack of the path taken from one point to another limits your ability to train models that can efficiently recreate the work
Isn’t this the problem inference (training) a model is designed to solve :)))
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That’s already the case. Chinese ingenuity allowed them to achieve what they did without access to reasoning outputs
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The economically useful frontier models will be fine tuned on data to make them useful for a specific project or task.
Isn't that what they are doing already? The model is already guarded and hidden and i only get to send it what i want. Talk with it to clarify my requirements. And i can switch to a different provider for cheaper/better results.
They tried to do that with operating systems and the browser.
I think this will be isolated to highly specialized fields where training data will need to be selectively curated.
Everything can be distilled, it will just become more painful