Comment by elzbardico
Comment by elzbardico a day ago
Models are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just recognized that.
Comment by elzbardico a day ago
Models are becoming commodities, and their economy doesn't justify the billions required to train a SOTA model. Apple just recognized that.
Having to pay has nothing to do with a good being a commodity. I have to pay for sugar, but there is no big difference between brands that justify any of them commanding a monopoly rent, so, sugar is a commodity. The same is more or less true of LLMs right now and unless someone comes up with a new paradigm beyond the transformers architecture, there is no reason to believe this commodification trend is going to be reversed.
Most of the differentiation is happening on the application/agent layer. Like Coworker.
The rest of it, is happening on post-training. Incremental changes.
We are not talking about EUV lithography here. There are no substantial moths of years of pure and applied research protected by patents.
Normal software has way less moat than SOTA labs.
SOTA AI models can have different architectures, vastly different compute in training, different ways of inferencing, different input data, different RL, and different systems around the model. Not to mention the significant personal user data that OpenAI is collecting.
Saying SOTA AI models are like sugar is insane.
What matter are the results. I'd say that Chinese companies are probably getting a better ROI from their projects using models a few months behind western models, because any deficiency in the models is surpassed by better engineering and better market fit of what they are building over those agents.
Models are becoming less like commodities. They're differentiating with strengths and weaknesses. When Chinese labs gain more traction, they will stop releasing their models for free. At that point, everyone who wants SOTA models will have to pay.