Comment by crimsoneer
5 hours ago
I think this is a quite optimistic view... releasing a SOTA model is a collosal capital investment, and unlike free software, it's not iterative - you can't make a small model and improve it one step at a time, you need to risk the whole load of cash, expertise and GPU time up front.
It's only happening now because labs have bucket tons of VC cash to burn and need a big public flex to raise more cash, or because they're subsidised by the Chinese government. I'm not massively confident either of those will stay true forever.
I'm not an expert, but maybe updating an existing open-weights model to give it up to date knowledge would be more tractable?
I think the problem is up to date knowledge isn't really the difficult or useful bit. We're sort of moving to a world where the real value in training comes from tool calling and performance over long context - your models shouldn't really be relying on their internal knowledge, but instead calling various tools. But the performance gap between now and six months for that is pretty huge.