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
This is probably ultimately unsustainable.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
And the success of things like ESP32 shows that good price + good enough is a powerful combination.
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.
what does this even mean, the commoditization... like a thing you can buy from a gas station? AI commoditization is the rock bottoming of pricing.
Usually we end up with cartels in such cases, see OPEC, mafias etc. But we have China throwing sticks into the wheels of the US providers that are attempting to make the cartel and "pacing the frontier"
Like a utility. Not 'ACME intelligence' but just 'Intelligence'. With multiple providers selling you intelligence that is 'good enough' by the token.
Whether a cartel forms is independent of whether a product is a commodity. To the extent that commodity markets are more likely to form a cartel, it's only because it's harder for them to form a monopoly.
The general problem is that if your legal system allows competitors to buy each other then they have the incentive to do that instead of competing. This is why there are supposed to be antitrust laws, and why we get problems whenever they're not actually enforced. But in a typical commodity market, even buying the competition doesn't quite work because someone new can always enter the market. Congratulations, you've cornered the market on landscaping services... until some unemployed fellow who already owns a lawnmower and a truck starts advertising their services.
OPEC is kind of a special case because the product is entirely fungible but it's also finite and consumed by usage. Landscaping services aren't meaningfully finite, if demand increased then supply could match it under any plausible scenario. Copper is finite but it isn't destroyed by usage, so if someone had a lock on copper mining then people could still get it by recycling existing products.
Whereas oil is finite but then the end customer burns it. If Saudi Arabia cuts production, Germany can't make up for it by extracting more domestically because they haven't got enough in the ground, but they also can't capture the exhaust from their cars or power plants and turn it back into petroleum because the product is really energy and it takes more energy to do that than you get from burning it to begin with. So if the largest exporters get together, they control enough of the market to control prices and there is no real way for anyone else to enter the market with enough production capacity to change that.
Until you realize that the product is really energy and you can get out from under their thumb by switching to electric cars and generating electricity without burning fossil fuels.
No we don’t. That’s quite rare.
Look at the collapse of the solar market around 2010 as the price collapsed.
Look at the collapse of the steel industry in the US as outsourcing to Asia took over in the 70s-80s.
Look at the entire computing boom from 1990-2020. Memory and storage followed such a steady line down and to the right that people are struggling to operate compute businesses in a normal market.
E-bikes, scooters, electric cars, lithium ion batteries in general. Most food.
The list of these commoditized things that started out as areas of innovation and became just the marginal cost of production is enormous.
Looks like AI will be another revolution, and eventually, probably the largest.
People are saying _training + inference_ is unprofitable (I don’t have a dog in the race and don’t really care either way). That’s a lot of GPUs and salaries that aren’t generating revenue at any moment.
Personally, I would guess Anthropic and OAI are profitable. I just suspect that they’re a pretty normal level of profitable and not the absurd, near-alchemical “can turn dirt into gold” level of profitable their valuation seems to have priced in.
OpenRouter's DeepSeek provider is basically this. Instead of renting H100's for dollars per hour, you pay someone that arbitrages the $/hr to $/token conversion because you can't actually saturate an H100 for hours. It's still effectively the same as running it yourself because of the ability to change providers to someone else arbitraging the same thing, and that there's always the escape hatch of switching to actually renting the H100s yourself.
I honestly don't think there are too many people arguing "AI is actually too expensive to take my job". "AI being too much of a commodity to make meaningful profits" could very well be the case though.
They are literally hoping Anthropic & OpenAI go bankrupt (totally possible), and everyone goes back to using their meat brains for work (never happening).
In this context it just doesn’t matter if these companies are profitable after amortizing training cost, because deployment of open weight models that already exist will continue to disrupt economies for at least the next decade if all research ended tomorrow.
People that want to believe something different as a coping mechanism will not be swayed by this evidence either.