George Hotz said there's 5 tiers of AI systems, Tier 1 - Data centers, Tier 2 - fabs, Tier 3 - chip makers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers. He said Tier 4 is going to eat all the value of Tier 5, and that Tier 5 is worthless. It's looking like that's going to be the case
That is a common refrain by people who have no domain expertise in anything outside of tech.
Spend a few years in an insurance company, a manufacturing plant, or a hospital, and then the assertion that the frontier labs will figure it out appears patently absurd. (After all, it takes humans years to understand just a part of these institutions, and they have good-functioning memory.)
This belief that tier 5 is useless is itself a tell of a vulnerability: the LLMs are advancing fastest in domain-expertise-free generalized technical knowledge; if you have no domain expertise outside of tech, you are most vulnerable to their march of capability, and it is those with domain expertise who will rely increasingly less on those who have nothing to offer but generalized technical knowledge.
yeah but if Anthropic/OpenAI dedicate resources to gaining domain expertise then any tier 5 is dead in the water. For example, they recently hired a bunch of finance professionals to make specialized models for financial modeling. Any startup in that space will be wiped out
I dont think the claim is exactly that tier 5 is useless more that tier 5 synergizes so well with tier 4 that all the popular tier 5 products will eventually be made by the tier 4 companies.
George Hotz says a lot of things. I think he's directionally correct but you could apply this argument to tech as a whole. Even outside of AI, there are plenty of niches where domain-specific solutions matter quite a bit but are too small for the big players to focus on.
Tier 5 requires domain expertise until we reach AGI or something very different from the latest LLMs.
I don’t think the frontier labs have the bandwidth or domain knowledge (or dare I say skills) to do tier 5 tasks well. Even their chat UIs leave a lot to be desired and that should be their core competency.
Interesting. I found a reference to this in a tweet [1], and it looks to be a podcast. While I'm not extremely knowledgable. I'd put it like this: Tier 1 - fabs, Tier 2 - chip makers, Tier 3 - data centers, Tier 4 - frontier labs, Tier 5 - Model wrappers
However I would think more of elite data centers rather than commodity data centers. That's because I see Tier 4 being deeply involved in their data centers and thinking of buying the chips to feed their data centers. I wouldn't be so inclined to throw in my opinion immediately if I found an article showing this ordering of the tiers, but being a tweet of a podcast it might have just been a rough draft.
1: https://x.com/tbpn/status/1935072881425400016
Andrew Ng argumented in 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p248yoa3oE ) that the underlying tiers depend on the app tier‘s success.
That OpenAI is now apparantly striving to become the next big app layer company could hint at George Hotz being right but only if the bets work out. I‘m glad that there is competition on the frontier labs tier.
People were saying the same thing about AWS vs SaaS ("AWS wrappers") a decade ago and none of that came to pass. Same will be true here.
Claude is a model wrapper, no?
Anthropic is a frontier lab, and Claude is a frontier model
Anthropic models are Sonnet / Haiku / Opus
https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overview
Okay, Claude is a _family_ of frontier models then. IMO that's a pedantic distinction in this context.