7 ms·

Now that is a good and interesting question! Hopefully a "no-moatist" will share their reasoning.

aurareturn 13d ago
Ultimately, that's what I need to be convinced. No one has put forth a good argument yet. Clever architecture --> Ok but OpenAI/Anthropic can use these as well and they also have very smart people with their secret clever architectures Distilling --> Ok but distilling means you will never be smarter than the original. Furthermore, reasoning is now hidden by private labs and they have poison pill answers for distilling if they can detect it. They will be able to detect distilling better and better. Cheaper electricity --> Ok this is cancelled out by their chips being much less efficient due to not having ASML EUV machine access. So I don't see why fundamentally their training costs are cheaper over the long term. I'm looking for a no-moatist to convince me.
- dartharva 13d ago
  Labor. Smart labor would be much cheaper I'd reckon in China than in the US.
  - aurareturn 13d ago
    How much advantage in costs? What % of labor is training cost?
    - celrod 13d ago
      Mercor, Tacit Labs, Handshake AI... I suspect companies like these play a big part in model improvements, generating high quality benchmark/task-focused data for training. However, these do require educated, white collar, workers.
    - dartharva 13d ago
      Considering that frontier scientists and engineers in the US are currently taking home seven (or even eight, in some cases) figure salaries - pretty high, I'd reckon.
      - aurareturn 13d ago
        Would like to see the math since the claim is made.
TechTechTech 13d ago
I am not a "no-moatist" per se but one can argue their might be a plateau to how good a inference llm can become. If this is the case the playing field shifts to context, tools and harness, which are much cheaper to build an compete on.
akie 13d ago
Because they're distilling frontier models and that's a lot faster and cheaper than training a frontier model from scratch?
- aurareturn 13d ago
  So why can't OpenAI/Anthropic also distill the good parts of free Chinese models? It's even better and easier for OpenAI and Anthropic. No poison pills as well.

Ultimately, that's what I need to be convinced. No one has put forth a good argument yet. Clever architecture --> Ok but OpenAI/Anthropic can use these as well and they also have very smart people with their secret clever architectures Distilling --> Ok but distilling means you will never be smarter than the original. Furthermore, reasoning is now hidden by private labs and they have poison pill answers for distilling if they can detect it. They will be able to detect distilling better and better. Cheaper electricity --> Ok this is cancelled out by their chips being much less efficient due to not having ASML EUV machine access. So I don't see why fundamentally their training costs are cheaper over the long term. I'm looking for a no-moatist to convince me.

dartharva 13d ago
Labor. Smart labor would be much cheaper I'd reckon in China than in the US.
- aurareturn 13d ago
  How much advantage in costs? What % of labor is training cost?
  - celrod 13d ago
    Mercor, Tacit Labs, Handshake AI... I suspect companies like these play a big part in model improvements, generating high quality benchmark/task-focused data for training. However, these do require educated, white collar, workers.
  - dartharva 13d ago
    Considering that frontier scientists and engineers in the US are currently taking home seven (or even eight, in some cases) figure salaries - pretty high, I'd reckon.
    - aurareturn 13d ago
      Would like to see the math since the claim is made.

TechTechTech 13d ago

I am not a "no-moatist" per se but one can argue their might be a plateau to how good a inference llm can become. If this is the case the playing field shifts to context, tools and harness, which are much cheaper to build an compete on.

akie 13d ago

Because they're distilling frontier models and that's a lot faster and cheaper than training a frontier model from scratch?

aurareturn 13d ago
So why can't OpenAI/Anthropic also distill the good parts of free Chinese models? It's even better and easier for OpenAI and Anthropic. No poison pills as well.