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Posted by bkd9 3 hours ago

What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x(catalystneuro.com)
91 points | 80 commentspage 2
nchmy 2 hours ago|
I've been working with the chinese open models for 4 months. They are more than capable for a tiny fraction of the cost of the frontier ones. And yet they also continue to get significantly better and (Deepseek's recent price increase aside) cheaper. Its hard to fathom how the truly frontier stuff will be able to compete long-term.
jostmey 2 hours ago|
And why won’t the frontier models continue to become better? The open models are getting better but so are the frontier models. The frontier models might remain in a constant race to remain ahead
sweetjuly 1 hour ago|||
I don't think it's a matter of "staying ahead"; the proprietary frontier models are better, but the trouble for them is that open weight models are good enough in increasingly many cases. This raises the floor on the frontier companies and cuts their total addressable market by commodifying the easier LLM tasks. This is really the central argument of tfa :)
cman1444 1 hour ago||
The big question is if there are larger economic gains to be made from ever greater intelligence. It seems to me like that may be the case for only a select few hard problems, while the vast majority of tasks approach their economic ceiling asymptotically with intelligence.
ForHackernews 2 hours ago||||
They are running out of novel, clean training data and compute. There is probably a limit to how much improvement can be squeezed out of LLMs. Recent improvements have been more about orchestration and "reasoning" loops (i.e. iteratively feeding context back through the model).
HappyPanacea 2 hours ago|||
Diminishing returns on both intelligence and training, mostly
bdhdhduuyd 2 hours ago||
Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds.

That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for their intelligence.

Well that's just my 2 cents.

Flamkuchlo 1 hour ago||
Sooooo what does it matter if we do 99% of things a LLM can just solve as a 'advanced search engine'?

Btw. an advanced search engine is probably the worst comparision i have read so far.

A LLM is a latent space which is capable of a lot of things a search engine can't do. It can apply different type of patterns and flows onto data, it can combine these etc.

My 'advanced search engine' was just able to create a working PR for exactly what i wanted it to solve (fixing a bug) by analysing the bug, finding a valid solution then commiting the solution itself.

iririririr 48 minutes ago|||
You're correct on the technology assessment.

But you forget all development today is just searching for a template, copy pasting, changing some small things. And a smart-ish search engine can do all that.

dboreham 2 hours ago||
I think this viewpoint fails to understand what "intelligence" is. The idea must be that intelligence is some special thing that only humans have. So when machines couldn't do jack s... we said "it's the Turing test". When machines blew through the Turing test we said "that was just prediction..not really intelligence, that's different".

It's not different. The delusion humans have is that intelligence is special and magical. It's not. It's just nature's prediction machine. A very fancy version to be sure. But not qualitatively different .

All statements that "oh but it'll never be able to do that" will prove false.

2ferr 10 minutes ago|||
Until you contribute something substantial to humanity that is novel, you ought to reduce the tone of confidence.
goatlover 1 hour ago||||
It's not about magic, it's that humans have an evolved embodied intelligence for surviving in the world as living organisms that reproduce, care for young and live in communities. That's quite a bit different from language models trained on human data.

Artificial intelligence is artificial. It can still be called intelligent, just not the same kind as biological since it's not remotely biological. It's human-like but also alien. To have something artificial be human you'd need something like replicants from Blade Runner which are synthetic biological robots.

perching_aix 1 hour ago|||
I notice that a lot of these terms are squarely humanist for certain people, so any kind of allegation that machines are exhibiting them as traits will be a complete showstopper for them. You'll either be strung along on an infinite goalpost moving exercise, or be accused of either anthropomorphization [0] in the kinder cases, or straight up mental illness in the less so kind cases. Never will they stop to consider that maybe you're simply working with a post-humanist understanding of these words, as that basically doesn't make sense to them, and as they are usually quite vested for it to stay that way.

I remember in one of the Hugging Face incident threads here, simply acknowledging that the agents were operating autonomously was super controversial. Thousands of years old concept [1], still inherently human for a lot of people.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be judgemental with this, I more consider it to be a communications breakdown, and find that to be frustrating instead. I'm not really sure how to meaningfully help it either, cause no matter how one slices it, you will in the end ask these people do desecrate these terminologies in favor of some more twisted-seeming ones. Same the other way around, the humanist understanding of these terms is basically non-workable.

[0] as opposed to personification, which is what people are actually doing almost always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton

LordHumungous 2 hours ago||
> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper in a field, every record in an archive, every email, or every message in a support queue as a matter of routine

Pretty much already happening

Multiplayer 2 hours ago||
This means a great de-risking is happening for the costs of deploying somewhat autonomous agents. This has profound implications on the timeline of deployable personal agents. Cost was a significant factor for many people during the OpenClaw frenzy, specifically when they let their agents run somewhat wild. It will become much more palatable, or already has, to install whatever the next generation of token consuming autonomous systems will be.
imnotr0b0t 1 hour ago||
The article is solid. But there is a nuance what he skipped — quality vs price. Sure, GPT-5.6 Luna for pennies can do the same thing what Claude 4.5 Sonnet did for a dollar a year ago. Except Sonnet back then actually carried the codebase, while Luna... eh, not so much. And another thing, speed. You can make it cheaper as much as you want, but if a model thinks for half a minute you save cents but lose time.
Tade0 58 minutes ago|
The other day I saw a benchmark of coding models that fit in 8GB VRAM - for reference some version of Mistral was added, normally requiring 32GB, but moving along at 4-5tok/sec when partially offloaded to CPU.

Surprisingly, some of the small models would not only give worse results, but also took longer than Mistral, because they were thinking so much.

That is an important detail which I was previously overlooking.

danieltk76 1 hour ago||
this guy gets it
iririririr 50 minutes ago||
all the optimistic pundits ignore the blatant second order consequence of this: the entire economy is pegged on this NOT being cheap!

all the US economy is tied to video cards being used in lieu of gold. cost dropping 100x means the economy bottom falls out.

qsera 2 hours ago|
Idiocy becomes rampant!
Flamkuchlo 1 hour ago||
Whats your problem?

Even if its not intelligence, a LLM found a bug due to one error message, fixed it, created a PR and it solved it.

If an LLM is only able to do all of this after training on it and never achieving AGI, we already at the point were it is cheaper to teach one LLM one problem than teaching humans to do so.

andai 2 hours ago|||
AGI ≈ Ralph × Infinite persistence

Just like real life!

perching_aix 2 hours ago||
becomes rampant? Where have you been the past decades? Hell, centuries and millenia?

If we're going cynical, may as well go full throttle.

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