non frontier intelligence will be a commodity. Frontier intelligence will be a high margin luxury good. this is how most markets work
Maybe if China stops releasing capable models the pace will slow down a little, but they have lots of incentives not to.
But even if we think back to the previous decade or two (sans AI), most of tech has been a a red queen's race - developing and improving stuff, without any real substantial results.
Microservices and orchestration are not better than old monoliths. Electron apps are not better than native. Most programs people actually use have decades-old codebases.
Video games of today don't look substantially better or play different than ones from 15 years ago.
As thje models get better, the % of the pie gets smaller and smaller. So higher and higher cost of getting frontier model out gets divided onto smaller and smaller customer base as other models catch up
However, the expectations for AI are not to make your software engineering work 100% faster.
It's, for example, to build software more or less end-to-end with minimal input and feedback from you.
Then next, robotics and boosting manufacturing. Not by 10% but let's say 200%.
Such are the ambitions. Can GLM 5.3 do it?
The crucial question is whether eg. Fable 6 can, and with what lead over the competition.
Open-weight models still have not beat February's Mythos.
As for the manual feedback: I want that manual feedback, but if I let it rip it will do just fine all by itself, but then I have no clue what is going on under the hood.
I have no clue about the state of robotics.
For software, I know that Opus 5.5 can handle more than GPT 5.6 Sol. I am willing to pay for the difference rather than use the cheaper DeepSeek Flash.
If you can't leverage AI to build a safe and useful robot without fully understanding the implementation, the model is not good enough.
My argument is that if safety and liability make the use of AI without fully understanding the implementation impossible, the model is arguably not good enough.
No such process exists for a model to take a design seriously that can kill people.
I imagine that the requirement is that after testing, you are confident that the product is safe.
I think you're entirely wrong, and we can leave it at that, seeing that you're clearly unwilling to engage constructively.
When we manually tested nuclear power plant controlling software, each test case was printed out on paper and tested and then signed by the tester. A lot of paper was produced and archived for each software release. (Archived for as long as the software was running in any nuclear power plant).
Everyone understood, that in a case of significant accident at the nuclear power plant, accident analysis would be done and if the root cause was an software error, this could have possible legal consequences for the developers and testers. (Of course nuclear power plants have many independent and redundant hardware controlling mechanisms, but incorrectly working controlling software could damage the power plant in a very costly way).
The prerequisite here is that you can trust it not to do something that gives criminals access to your bank account or allows users to consume an unlimited amount of services it costs you money to provide for free or bankrupts you through legal liability etc.
It's basically this:
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision."
Notice what this is actually saying. It's not saying that the computer can't generate a given output. It's saying that if the computer makes a mistake and you don't bother to check, you're the one who has to eat it.
That's a great way of putting it. So far I always used 'you can outsource work but you can't outsource responsibility'.
Legendary quote from an internal 1979 IBM training document [1]
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
This is probably ultimately unsustainable.
But why wouldn't you want (and pay) for the very best plumber? A frontier plumber will optimize the time their customers poop, pee, bathe, or do dishes 10x to 200x, and with their freed-up time,they'll outcompete those who don't pay for frontier plumbing!
The next move in my investment strategy is obvious though, invest to the hilt in PVC tubing and I thank you for this invaluable insight. Fortunately this forum has no visitors so we can rest secure in the fact that the pigs won't realize it is too late to avoid being slaughtered. Power to the bulls, after all it is their product more than anything that is responsible for the plumbing revolution.
SMRs are being commercialized. Likewise nuclear cargo ships have been seriously studies. Nuclear reactor powered (not just RTG) satellites have been built.
I know this is beside your point, but I think if we figured out how to commercialize this, demand would come.
A high per-user r&d means high costs per user. So then users leave to save a buck, qnd the price goes up again for the remaining users.
Maybe it works out OK if you want to signal wealth - the high price is the selling point. But luxury pure utility is a hard sell to consumers, and for luxury B2B it's about high touch sales (e.g. Oracle).
The only answer I could come up with is hedge funds. Everyone else fails some part of my criteria.
And the success of things like ESP32 shows that good price + good enough is a powerful combination.