| > we cannot currently disambiguate how easy it is to get close to the frontier in a vacuum. Whether open-weight labs can get to the frontier on their own is irrelevant IMO. Even if all R&D were to stop today it would take a decade at least for the productivity gains from current open-weight models to trickle through the economy. For 99% of use cases of AI there simply isn't a need for further development of the frontier, where we are very clearly at diminishing returns. How many white collar workers need to write an OS or develop sophisticated software? Think about a normal office worker - they an easily double their productivity by creating a well-thought-out partnership between the human and today's open weight AI. Humans and today's AI are very complementary. AI brings vast knowledge, pattern recognition, and infinite patience for grunt work. Human brings context and reasoning and verification. Frontier labs are trying to replace the human altogether by trying to make AI do things that AI is weak at and humans are strong at. This is silly but they have no choice because of the massive profits they've promised their investors. It's not enough to double every knowledge worker's productivity. They want to replace the knowledge worker altogether. This is creating a massive spike in training & inference cost that is almost certainly more expensive than the human labor its intended to replace. Fable and 5.6 sol are supposedly around 8-10T parameters. Is there enough compute on earth to make a 100T or 1Q model? We would need models that size to replace the human altogether. > I also don’t believe we have seen anything like 1% of inference demand fulfilled globally. I agree with this, but the massive demand for inference will force companies to be price conscious and drive them away from ultra high margin frontier models to low margin open weight models. This is why it will become a low-margin, commodity market. Immense innovation right now is going into tiny, specialized models that run on device. See PrismML getting a mid sized QWEN model to run on an iPhone. When on-device inference becomes a thing we'll see another explosion in inference that will further leach demand away from frontier labs. > I also don’t believe these open letters are signed by people that are all master strategists and just economically motivated. I agree if you could read their minds they might think they're doing it for the "right reasons." But massive $$$ can create equally massive self justification/deception. |