Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

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Imagine there’s a school where all the kids there are being tutored by the best. Also imagine a bunch of neighboring schools drastically falling behind that would need insane amounts of money to keep up.

This becomes a problem because all the kids from the rich school will dominate the order schools. They’ll get even more money as time goes on from their kids paying it forward to the point where all other kids are bound to work for them.

Now let’s say one other school does have the money for best tutors, BUT they know they’ll run out pretty quickly. Instead of trying to compete in a losing game, they decide to give every school in the world access to their elite lesson plan. Now, for a time, everyone will be on close to a level playing field. If the other schools improve upon their own lesson plans and keep sharing them with others, one day the elite school will wake up to find they are no longer on top. The parents have started to move their kids to other schools because the rich school is no longer attractive at the high cost they charge students

Sure and to complete your analogy here, the rich schools realize that the curriculum they develop and put a lot of time and money into creating is just used by the cheap schools, so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum.

Now what?

The fundamental problem here is incentives and tactics. Either the models are actually better (which I think the iPhone to cheap Android phone really speaks to, i.e. they do the same thing but one is 50x better at 5x-10x the cost) and thus they can be gate kept and like the iPhone the vast majority of profits go to a select few with high end implementations. OR the models aren't actually that much better, companies lose a fortune and then nobody can create any better commercial models or build out scale needed for open source models because it's not profitable.

We could wind up with only open-source models or something along those lines, but if the compute and scale is needed to train the models, nobody will be able to do that profitably and so AI research is either gate kept and silo'd for something like military applications or it just doesn't really happen because there's no funding for this scale of build out.

> so they stop developing it because nobody loses money for long and so neither the rich or cheap schools develop any new curriculum

Why do you assume the poor schools wouldn't be smart enough to keep it going? It's very likely the can collectively beat the rich school now that the one other rich school opened access to their materials and led the charge.

> but if the compute and scale is needed to train the models, nobody will be able to do that profitably

But they would. Efficiently hosting models will be the real business and early access to models with incremental improvements will not be the moat once thought. The reason other companies don't feel they can compete is the same reason OAI and Anthropic will lose their lead. They banked too heavily on another player NOT leading the charge on open research and poured disgusting amounts of money at closed source models.

China has proved they can take the limited resources available to them and build something better than what the US is offering consumers [1]. I'm just waiting for other countries to start pitching in.

Reminds me of the NSA and their early battles with cryptographers who believed in open research.

[1] https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078984980588531855

iphone is 50x better? because you get a blue box around your text rather than green?

androids and iphones are approximately the same thing

the kinda obvious direction LLM training can go is into the direction of particle physics, and the training is set up democratically and through universities and via multi-state funding

then the resulting weights end up open, the same as the particle detection data

> androids and iphones are approximately the same thing

Yet...

  Android holds 70.6% of global active devices to iOS at 28.7%, but iOS captures 64.2% of consumer app spend. [1]

> and the training is set up democratically and through universities and via multi-state funding

Possible, certainly. But this case also applies to China and its "open-weights" strategy. They won't be able to form companies either or get ahead.

[1] https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/mobile-os-market-share-2...

"Things on my phone cost more, so its clearly a better phone."

Based on the above stat, it sure seems like Androids more versatile and inexpensive for a much larger group of users.

Hmm...that sounds familiar....

Sure, but at the end of the day, Apple makes a lot more money not just on device sales but app sales too even though Android phones are allegedly more versatile and inexpensive.

You can talk about open-source and cheap Chinese models all you want, but at the end of the day if American companies are making all the money that's kind of all that matters. That will feed into development and maintaining an edge.

Try selecting a file in your 50x iphone - triple copy of the same file or ateast double copy (assuming os will post a soft link). If a large file then you are toast.

Try mmapping > 5GB file in your 50x better iPhone.

Try running any service in the background.

The list goes on and on.

Your 50x better suddenly became 50x worse compared to a much cheaper android.

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