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Comment by Philpax | Hacker News Reader

Are these other labs in the room with us now?

No, seriously, I'm all for a multipolar world here, but he's right that the frontier is literally just those two companies at present.

Google is behind. MSL is doing better, but not by much. xAI is a dysfunctional joke. Thinking Machines aren't on the frontier. SSI's primary output is their announcement post. Poolside was bought by NVIDIA. Arcee aren't vying for frontier. Magic have been largely AWOL, aside from their recent blog post. Reflection have shipped nothing.

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Are you suggesting that models like Muse Spark 1.3, Grok 4.6 High, Kimi K3 Max, GLM-5.3 Max, Qwen 3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Agnes 3.0 Flash, Fugu Max, and others are so far behind GPT-6 Astra or Claude Fable 5.1 in capabilities that they have some sort of impenetrable moat that will prevent others from ever catching up or something?

No, but I am suggesting that OpenAI and Anthropic are further down the RSI path than any of the other companies, as we can see from the model that solved Navier-Stokes being less than two weeks old at the time: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

If four other labs are six months behind, it really doesn't matter in the long term: in six months, they'll all have these capabilities. Time does not stop moving forward! We haven't seen real moats aside from capital in this space, and even the effect of capital seems to only give a thin, easily eroded edge.

I think the point is that RSI is meant to lead to exponential growth in capabilities. If that comes, then being 6 months behind leads to a greater and greater gap, because of how exponential growth works.

Personally I expect there is some initial gap on new capabilities as they are released, and then it closes quickly. Astra is good at math and 3d modelling, this will come soon to the others and in 6 months we'll be able to run it quantised on a 3090.

I don't know why everyone assumes RSI will be quadratic or exponential growth.

It might well be sublinear, but just faster than humans.

Most problems in science face severe diminishing returns.

Human growth has already been exponential, so it seems absurd to assume it would be only polynomial.

There's a Twitter rumor that deepmind achieved RSI very recently.

Either way, to count Google out entirely is really foolish.

Or the entirety of China. People forget that progress is incremental until it's not. Then some revolutionary insight or capability comes along that disrupts the whole field or market.

Yes, labs with more (human) resources may have a bigger chance at being the first to gain and implement such an insight, but it's not a given that they will.

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