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.
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.
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.
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.
https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/about-claude/models/overview