Posted by sbochins 16 hours ago
I don't understand how a product that:
- is interfaced with and is deeply linked to natural language, so everything you produce (sessions, history, etc) is in Markdown and you can literally install a second model and tell it "hey import all of Claude's memory into yours" and that's it
- is based on well understood technology, the real constraints are how much money you put into training the models, but the theory has all been developed in the open
- clearly has a threshold where it quickly commoditises and turns from "I want the best" to "hey the best is a bit too expensive. The second best is half the price and works close enough".
was ever supposed to be a money printing machine. The fact something is extremely useful doesn't imply it's extremely profitable.
IMHO we're clearly speedrunning the process of turning AI into a commodity. Dario Amodei knows pretty well that when or if Anthropic cuts people off Fable, the vast majority of them will definitely not pay for it because Opus 4.8 is good enough for almost everybody that _knows_ what they're doing, and so are basically half of the most recent models. If I already have good baking skills I don't become more productive with an automatic bread machine, I just need a better dough mixer and oven
A closely related question is “what do the American labs need to do in order to justify their enormous market valuations?”
It seems like the answer cannot possibly be “gradually improve model capability while figuring out how to better monetize inference.” The valuations are just way too high for that to be sufficient.
Surely the answer has to be “continually achieve large leaps in capability comparable to the first consumer releases of ChatGPT while also maintaining a significant capability lead over open models and new competitors.”
And does anyone think that’s going to happen? Even with state-level protection from competition (which incidentally would significantly harm the American economy), the large leaps in capability seem to be coming fewer and farther between.
What appeared initially to be a huge innovation was later easily duplicated by many. There are no platform-lockins or network effects. Switching costs for users are zero, and there are low barriers to entry, with vast numbers of models to choose from and more appearing every day. As a business a token will be a commodity like an electron. Doesnt matter who produces it, or how (solar, wind, coal, nuclear etc) as long as it powers my toaster.
everything else we see today is just preparing for it.
Is anyone using open source models for anything major ?
What is the parento frontier?
The Pareto frontier tells you which designs are the best in at least one of your metrics (non-dominated by another design). For example if you're selecting a car and you care about both speed and mpg, a Formula 1 car and a Prius might lie on the Pareto frontier, but a Model T Ford would not.
So like, on a cost-intelligence graph, the cheapest and most intelligent models are pareto optimal. Then in-between those if you have
- cost $3 intelligence 6
- cost $1 intelligence 5
- cost $2 intelligence 4
The 1st and 2nd are pareto optimal, the 3rd is not, because it's dominated by the 2nd (2nd is cheaper AND more intelligent at the same time)
On Openrouter Kimi K3 says it does not retain data or train on it, which is better than what US hosts claim for Claude, ChatGPT, etc.. as they collect and retain data even if you disable training on it.
Opencode or similar open source tool + a zero data retention provider is about the best option aside from running a smaller fully local model on your own PC.
1) Kimi 3 is a "very good model"
2) It's performance can NOT be explained by distillation
3) The US government should create FUD to stop US corporations from using it (so they use OpenAI instead)
Here's the thing about this though, the auto industry directly employed hundreds of thousands of people.
The AI labs are small, only few benefit directly from their wealth and there's already immense opposition to AI, data centers, etc...