Comment by lebovic
19 hours ago
It's too late to prevent distillation of some capabilities, like writing code or finding vulnerabilities [1].
But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics.
Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing proliferation through distillation is considered more important.
[1]: See the notes on distillation in https://dualuse.dev/posts/export-controls-on-fable
My long-term prediction for the sector is that frontier models will be so expensive that they will only be available for grant-funded projects at research institutions, like supercomputer clusters were 25 years ago.
Why? Well it depends, most evidence is suggesting that Anthropic and OpenAI are making a lot of money on inference so the question is whether its more profitable for them to sell 100X tokens for Y, or 1X tokens for 100Y. In most industries with high fixed costs and low variable costs and unlimited scalability (like LLM providers) the first option ends up being much more profitable
Literally nobody is making money on inference
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