Comment by anthonypasq
16 hours ago
non frontier intelligence will be a commodity. Frontier intelligence will be a high margin luxury good. this is how most markets work
16 hours ago
non frontier intelligence will be a commodity. Frontier intelligence will be a high margin luxury good. this is how most markets work
Yesterday’s frontier is today’s commodity, so I don't think frontier AI is out of reach. With computing and solar energy costs continuing to drop, the current AI supply shortages are just a temporary blip. We’ll probably land right back in standard boom-and-bust cycles.
Either frontier AI will continue to get better steadily, until it's better than people at basically everything, and very weird things start to happen, or, it plateaus and the open weights models will eventually catch up.
There's a third possibility, which to me is also the most plausible. Models will keep getting better and better within certain domains, while never catching up with humans when it comes to other type of tasks. Like that elusive quality-without-a-name some have called "taste". Or knowing what UX is most intuitive to humans. Really, anything where we have to tap into our common humanity and our human experience in order to be of help to other humans and generally to life on earth. Which is an all-important skill, since the flowering of life on the earth is (or should be) the whole point of anything we do, after all.
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Everyone knows the path followed by every single technology mankind has ever developed - including the incredible run that was Moore's law. Sure, some will think "This time is different" - but is it?
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But it is not a constant point of "this % of people needs the frontier intelligence".
As thje models get better, the % of the pie gets smaller and smaller. So higher and higher cost of getting frontier model out gets divided onto smaller and smaller customer base as other models catch up
Yes, this is the crunchy bit and we're already well underway on that curve. I haven't touched a frontier model in months because I can do with smaller ones without wondering/worrying when I'll get banned next because what I'm doing is dual use. Qwen was the the first time I thought oh, ok, so this is 90% of what I need. Then DS4 made that 95% and with GLM 5.3 it's somewhere between 99% and 100%. Now, I'm not trying to solve any Nobel prize winning stuff here but if that's the kind of customer that will remain I don't think the frontier model providers are going to like the next six months or so.
That's the crux of the issue. You think that GLM 5.3 is all you need.
However, the expectations for AI are not to make your software engineering work 100% faster.
It's, for example, to build software more or less end-to-end with minimal input and feedback from you.
Then next, robotics and boosting manufacturing. Not by 10% but let's say 200%.
Such are the ambitions. Can GLM 5.3 do it?
The crucial question is whether eg. Fable 6 can, and with what lead over the competition.
Open-weight models still have not beat February's Mythos.
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And over a increasingly small slice of time, as, due to the commodification of these things, the frontier businesses will see their customer base walk to the next one that does any better on their task.
This is probably ultimately unsustainable.
Every time they throw someone out with a message about how this request is definitely against their safety guidelines they are clinching the deal on someone running something local or switching to a provider that just lets them get on with their day. Their own fearmongering is going to be part of their undoing.
Agreed, but I I wonder what fraction of tasks really require frontier performance, either in terms of sheer difficulty or where speed is a matter of necessity. For many jobs, it's increasingly a question of whether you'd rather have one filet mignon or 20 good cheeseburgers (all from the same cow).
A high margin luxury good with huge r&d costs is a death spiral.
A high per-user r&d means high costs per user. So then users leave to save a buck, qnd the price goes up again for the remaining users.
Maybe it works out OK if you want to signal wealth - the high price is the selling point. But luxury pure utility is a hard sell to consumers, and for luxury B2B it's about high touch sales (e.g. Oracle).
I’m not sure if this counts as a nitpick, but the definition of frontier automatically includes the cheapest models
The models will be a commodity, the resources to run the frontier will be the luxury good. This is already the case nearly.
The market for "frontier intelligence" will be too small to serve outside of certain government/military applications that exist in spite of market forces, in the same way that the market for small, portable nuclear reactors is exclusively limited to submarines and aircraft carriers. When I call a plumber, I don't need a frontier plumber, I just need someone who's baseline competent.
> I just need someone who's baseline competent
But why wouldn't you want (and pay) for the very best plumber? A frontier plumber will optimize the time their customers poop, pee, bathe, or do dishes 10x to 200x, and with their freed-up time,they'll outcompete those who don't pay for frontier plumbing!
You forgot the /s
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there is definitely an asymptote
Non-frontier intelligence has become a commodity already.
And the success of things like ESP32 shows that good price + good enough is a powerful combination.