Comment by stillpointlab

I think part of this thinking is in reverse. What I mean by that is people are saying something like "Imagine if 18 months ago a company started to create an ASIC based on GPT-4o (or whatever was good at the time). By today they'd have a model that is not great by today's standard but good enough".

Maybe, but what is the shelf-life of that 18 month decision? Barely good enough today, when it launches, starts to get worse and worse every month going forward. You have to recuperate that investment on your depreciating asset.

And you are competing against anyone with the foresight to use a TPU instead, and the benefit from any new paper that finds how to distill, quantize or whatever better so their solution gets algorithmic boosts while you are locked in.