[aenis]

The end game here is going back from a model where a bunch of product and tech management people sit in the U.S. or Europe, and try to manage thousands of mediocre talent sitting somewhere far away. The new model is you give those coding tools to good engineers colocated with your product people, and you ship good stuff much faster. If you can achieve such a setup, the token costs can be $50k per seat per month and you still run circles around the legacy IT models in terms of efficiency. Giving everyone the API keys and not changing the way products are managed is not going to work.

[overgard]

Good lord, what company would want to spend 600k per employee just to go maybe %20 faster (what the studies seem to show is a realistic estimate for productivity gains),

I'm building a product right now with some AI coding (despite my negative sentiment about AI in general they are useful). I am both the product person and the engineer, and I'm pretty decent at using it, so according to the hype I should be seeing like a 10x speedup. I am not seeing that. It's definitely faster, but there are also days where I'm stuck cleaning up things after going too fast for too long, or periods where I need to put the software in front of people to get real feedback, or even periods where I just need to use it extensively myself to find the pain points and bugs. I just don't see this "running circles" once you get past an MVP and you actually need to build something secure and not embarassingly broken.

[grttq]

To me the question is, can the frontier labs make the variance of output lower + make the output of higher quality to justify their prices?

If not lower priced chinese offerings will be better as its cheaper per token - giving you more attempts to offset the variance.

My feeling on the former is no... I believe they tried really hard but they've settled on pure marketing now to attempt to fight off the chinese with perceived superiority in quality.