[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.