From whom? OpenAI and Google? Who else has the sort of resources to train and run SOTA models at scale?
You just reduced the supply of engineers from millions to just three. If you think it was expensive before ...
From whom? OpenAI and Google? Who else has the sort of resources to train and run SOTA models at scale?
You just reduced the supply of engineers from millions to just three. If you think it was expensive before ...
> Who else has the sort of resources to train and run SOTA models at scale?
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Reka AI, Alibaba (Qwen), 01 AI, Cohere, DeepSeek, Nvidia, Mistral, NexusFlow, Z.ai (GLM), xAI, Ai2, Princeton, Tencent, MiniMax, Moonshot (Kimi) and I've certainly missed some.
All of those organizations have trained what I'd class as a GPT-4+ level model.
Ah but I said "_... and running at scale_"
Of the list I gave you, at a guess:
Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba (Qwen), Nvidia, Mistral, xAI - and likely more of the Chinese labs but I don't know much about their size.
I guess where I was leading to is who owns the compute that runs those models. Mistral, for example, lists Microsoft and Google as subprocessors (1). Anthropic is (was?) running on GCP and AWS.
So, we have multiple providers, but for how long? They're all competing for the same hardware and the same energy, and it will naturally converge into an oligopoly. So, if competition doesn't set the floor, what does?
Local models? If you're not running the best model as fast as you can, then you'll be outpaced by someone that does.
1. https://trust.mistral.ai/subprocessors
A tri-opoly can still provide competitive pressure. The Chinese models aren’t terrible either. Kimi K2.5 is pretty capable, although noticeably behind Claude Opus. But its existence still helps. The existence of a better product doesn’t require you to purchase it at any price.
> The existence of a better product doesn’t require you to purchase it at any price
It does if it means someone using a better model can outpace you. Not spending as much as you can means you don't have a business anymore.
It's all meaningless, ultimately. You're not building anything for anyone if no one has a job.