Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public, every such announcement will become a reliable sell signal
The open models are now good enough for what I want to do with them, let alone any future improvements. And factoring in efficiency gains, a model in the ~70b range starting to satisfy my needs would completely obviate the need to pay others for inference. This does not seem far-fetched to me, comparing with where open models were at this time last year. What am I missing?
you can't create a new drug by running a model on a laptop. You can't serve a customer support bot running on a laptop. You can't generate video in bulk for many users on a laptop. So there is still a case for paying others for inference.
Does it justify the valuations? No idea, but some major use cases are still there. That's why they are rushing to implement, OpenAI creating a "deployment company", Anthropic having some pharma rumors, etc.
I think GP was asking specifically about the use case for closed models.
Or, the company itself can rent the GPU and host the model of their choice on it.
> But they would have to keep up with how good the private models are.
Why? The whole point of the thread is that the marginal gains of using private models is a fraction of the additional cost of using those private models.
IOW, if you really need that improvement over the open models, you can go ahead and pay it. What we are seeing though is that the improvement in general is barely noticeable but the cost is 4x as much.
Unless you are spending more than a max subscription (200 a month+) its cheaper to use the cloud.
But things are priced cheaper in the cloud now to lock you in and restrictions around hosted models are getting worse.
If you only have a $300 dollar laptop its probably not worth the upgrade.
I'm personally excited by local AI but the experience for the average isn't the same. I'm willing to get .5/s running on 10-15 years old machines but what I can do with it is limited.
So just like in IPhone vs Android, you could end up with a situation where Chinese firms compete and get most of the revenue and usage with low profit margins but OpenAI and Anthropic capture a premium side of the market and still get a lot of profits.
Their marketing department :-) . I'm only half-joking; those guys are hard at work finding the best product-market fit for ChatGPT/Claude. "Product market fit" means "strongest revenue", which is not necessarily going to bring the best tool for you or me, but the one that can either get more consumers to shell off money, or more enterprises to cough money for licenses, and in both cases those consumer basis will be narrowed down to what legal and geopolitical circumstances allow OpenAI and Anthropic (and this is why they want to ban the competition!). It also means dark patterns and enshitification, of which I'm already seeing some both in the Codex interface (it was just renamed "ChatGPT"!!!) and in Claude Code (which also is just "Claude" now and can't '@' properly any longer). So in the medium run most people will be better off running an open source harness that can use any model.
I have numerous cases where Sol failed and only Fable could solve a problem. For example yesterday I was merging a Q2 curved with a Bezier curved face in 3D using OpenSCAD. I tried for over 2 hours with Sol 5.6 high and x-high.
Fable two-shotted it in about 30 minutes.
In my experience open models (or GLM, DS and Kimi) are radically worse than either of Claude or ChatGPT at these tasks.
I think there is a huge "long tail" of tasks like this where the frontier labs are ahead, and I think this long tail is quite important.
I settled on Fable for design, Opus for build routine, and every now and then I'd try out the Chinese models. In my experience they do fine on small codebases, and quickly get confused on anything larger than 500k LOC.
My use case is: mature, very well documented, fully Ai written code, with about 1:10 ratio of prompts/specs to code, and codebase sizes >500k and <2m LOC. Once one achieves the state of good, comprehensive design documentation I can literally vibe code with single sentence prompts thanks to the extensive test coverage, ADRs, and tens of thousands of lines of specs. Fable/Opus works predictably well, the Chinese models are literally dangerous to the codebase.
LLMs are useful. We can all see that in agentic coding. But replacing everyone’s job? Hardly. And what’s with the scare tactic of trying to get the US government to ban foreign models?
LLMs are useful, and dare I say they’re on par with the internet. Making them cheaper and affordable is good for everyone. The fear mongering from Anthropic and OpenAI looks like an attempt to corner the US market into using only US models so they can keep the profits, especially since China has proven that LLMs are a commodity. US AI labs should work on making LLMs cheaper or better harness. Altman and Dario are not trustworthy.
> “My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we’ve been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications” https://www.cxtoday.com/ai-automation-in-cx/sam-altman-softe...
I agree re: Dario quietly pushing for government control. He also said LLMs would replace a lot of entry-level information jobs, doubling the unemployment rate from 4-5% to 10%.
Yale did a study recently showing little impact on employment in high-AI exposed jobs https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/ai-probably-not-yet-reas...
Yet here we are, still driving our own cars, and laughing at silly behavior of most advanced self-driving systems.
I am certain we'll get to something of similar value, but I expect we'll have to improve infrastructure too (smart roads).
> "Anthropic believes that they are the ones who should have final say over how Anthropic is used; given that they think only they should be developing leading edge AI, they by extension think that only they should have final say over AI generally. When you further combine this realization with the company’s pronouncements about AI’s ability to conduct all economic activity, you realize that Anthropic’s leadership effectively wants to have power over everything and everyone."
"Concrete Problems in AI Safety" by Dario and another founder was published 2016, anthropic was founded 2021. Among a bunch of other examples, including other founders.
If safety is seen as a joke now, it was really seen as a joke back then. The reason they keep shooting themselves in the foot with bad PR is because they truly believe in risks.
And for safety? Oh yeah, they literally sell the removal of guardrails in exchange for minimum spend commitments.
Completely unrelated to AI safety.
they literally sell the removal of guardrails in exchange for minimum spend commitments
It seems blindingly obvious to me that you'd want to let trusted organizations use the models defensively, which means without guardrails, and that you'd probably gate that behind some kind of enterprise sales process, for multiple reasons.
Honestly, it just seems like you have an axe to grind and aren't really particularly knowledgeable (or curious) about AI safety.
2. You misstated what I wrote. My gripe is not that they have an enterprise sales process. It’s that in negotiations, they say “we’ll drop the safeguards if you agree to spend more”. I haven’t heard of any groundbreaking AI safety research concluding that spending more with Anthropic makes the models safer, but maybe Dario has a new blog post coming.
3. Check your tone.
Again, you just have an axe to grind, and you've picked a poor area in which to grind it.
When someone says they are doing something to help you, but it really helps them, you have to choose if you trust what they say. One way to know if you can trust them is to watch how they behave.
(By the way, I have been very transparent on HN that I have an axe to grind, literally referring to it as “an axe to grind”. My axe is that I think the frontier labs are a symptom of a cancer on our society, and I personally wish to see them and their tactics fail.)
Your simpler version still sidesteps the point that a trademark dispute has nothing to do with AI safety. Other than that you disagree with it, therefore they’re dishonest scammers, therefore AI safety is all bullshit?
That's what Hollywood has been telling me my entire life!