Comment by bunderbunder
21 hours ago
What is the unit of measure for “intelligence per dollar”, and how do you measure it? Without a concrete definition, that first assertion is not even wrong.
I would also like to point out that “profitable on inference” is similarly meaningless, because it’s based on a figure that arbitrarily discards whatever bits of their operating costs they need to to get to the claim that they’re profitable on inference. Potentially including ones that can’t be ignored because they’re every bit as much a part of COGS as the actual inference is.
>What is the unit of measure for “intelligence per dollar”, and how do you measure it?
It's going to depend on the task (and this is prone to cheating), but you can get a decent idea by looking at task benchmarks and the cost of completing them.
I was inclined to agree but Anthropic's latest S-1 statement only includes a paper loss due to their value going up. They're objectively making money now, the only question is can they keep it up and can they grow enough to be able to pay the bills they've signed up for in future?
But benchmark performance is not the same thing as intelligence.
Which is a really important distinction. One measures specific points on the jagged boundary. The other is a word that blithely paints it all with a single brush, and sweeps the jagged boundary problem under the rug in the process.
It really is important to keep track of that. Whenever we talk about “intelligence” as if it were a well-defined (let alone quantifiable) thing, we fall into the kind of wooly thinking that lets anyone say pretty much anything. We abandon the realm of grounded statements in favor of pure vibes.
Eh, I get what you mean. AI especially seems to have performance that is much more difficult to reason about than human intelligence (where most aspects of mental capability are surprisingly strongly correlated). But in this context, if you broadly focus on intelligence as the ability to complete problem-solving tasks, models have been improving pretty uniformly at the same time as getting cheaper.