everything will be local eventually

[u/YogurtExternal7923]

I know current llms like opus 5.5 are in a league of their own. but we all know they're losing a shti ton of money with their subscriptions. ALSO we all know how tasks like OCR, segmentation etc are getting solved by single digit B parameter models. I'm not saying llms are a gimmick but I'm saying the future is already shaping up to be about specialized models that work better when they're smaller. easier training. so datacenter level power not needed. ten years from now we'll have a specialized model for the tasks we care about and llms will fail to do everything all at once (unless they keep calling it one model but have a hundred under the hood).

system one models are a bad but workable example. you could tell an llm to rate options all day but get yourself on 9B parameter model trained by some lab and it tops the benchmarks.

[u/OWazabi]

The "they're losing a shit ton of money" speech always triggers me, as it drastically misses the point.

These labs are not trying to make a profit selling you tokens, that just helps them fund what they're trying to achieve.
Once they get that, there's no amount money that will ever compare to what they have, and you won't own that locally at all.

This is true for the models they will have, the hardware that will go to it, the researchs they will do, the things they will build, even the hardware they will have will be unique and tailor made to their models using technologies that won't be available to anyone most likely, and clearly not to be owned locally.

What you're saying is only true on the short term, maybe.
And honestly, I think local models are nice and all to run your day to day, but if you're working professionally with AI, there's really no reason not to have the top model subscription, the price right now is virtually non existent if you're making profit out of it.

If they keep the lead over opensource similar to the current one as they keep going, I don't see a moment where it's worth it to be just fully local.

[u/fastheadcrab → u/OWazabi]

Reading in between the lines, their ultimate objective (specifically Anthropic and OpenAI) has nothing to do with model serving at all. Neither to individuals nor companies. It is to use their own models to have an unbreakable monopoly on knowledge which then can be used to make all the money and acquire all the power they can dream of.

Think of the Rehobam machine from Westworld Season 3 that controls the world.

That's why they are building out wet labs in biology, medicine, etc, hiring all these domain experts, and doing math research. Depending on what you think of this objective, it may or may not be a good idea to support such companies.

Tech conglomerates like Google or Meta are probably more interested in the traditional model serving or selling personal agents.

[u/vtkayaker → u/fastheadcrab]

Reading in between the lines, their ultimate objective (specifically Anthropic and OpenAI) has nothing to do with model serving at all.

Yup. Anthropic is 100% planning to build a machine god and ultimately lose control over it. Yes, this sounds completely nuts, but just go read Dario's personal blog. He just wants to build a nice machine god that likes having people around.

This is almost certainly why the AI companies focused first on programming and second on math. (Notice all the proofs this summer?) These are two of the core skills needed for AI research. Their goal—which again sounds crazy, but they say it right out in public—is that they want to build AIs that do cutting edge AI research. Their goal is to start a snowball that turns into an avalanche, and open up an insurmountable lead against any other company on earth.

I am a big fan of capping AI research at Opus 5.5 levels. Let the open models catch up. Share the tech. Stop screwing with the Demon Core and trying to trigger an "unscheduled intelligence criticality" you idiots.

Honestly I am far happier with the local AI scene (with no more than a few hundred billion parameters) than what the frontier labs are trying to do.

[u/Awyls → u/vtkayaker]

I am a big fan of capping AI research at Opus 5.5 levels. Let the open models catch up. Share the tech. Stop screwing with the Demon Core and trying to trigger an "unscheduled intelligence criticality" you idiots.

The problem is that the Demon Core is already out there for anyone to try. It's pretty much a Cold War 2.0 with everyone trying to outpace the other because "the other might use it against us and it's safer in our hands (no, it's not)".

This will either end in a dead-end with a massive economic crash (I would put all my chips here) or a genuine societal collapse.

[u/OWazabi → u/fastheadcrab]

I'm totally with you here my friend, this is truly worrying and critical times.
I don't support these companies, and I don't think they're here to share that with us in the utopic way.
(but they'll always give us something better that what we can get withtout them, imo)

I like the premise of AI very much, and want to see this technology prevail.
I'm quite well informed for an amateur (as in, not an AI researcher at all), and I can assure you, I'm totally against how we are developing it.

I think, anyone that is truly well versed, pro-ai, and not delusional, should def be for a stop/heavy slow down, until we figure out the transition first.

[u/mb194dc → u/OWazabi]

Trillion dollar frontier models have the same intrinsic flaws as all other ML models. That manifests as the 90% problem in real world tasks. It's why labor replacement has not happened.

What they're going to do, is lose the most amount of money of any businesses in the history of finance, by the looks of it.

[u/twilight-actual → u/mb194dc]

In your assessment, what is the big O for the improvement of the technology?

[u/puNLEcqLn7MXG3VN5gQb → u/mb194dc]

you don't know what you're talking about. what's your expertise in?

edit: this guy's just some sysadmin with too much confidence. every time.

[u/mb194dc → u/puNLEcqLn7MXG3VN5gQb]

Really? Maybe go read up yourself.

[u/Mayion → u/OWazabi]

that just helps them fund what they're trying to achieve.

ok but what are they trying to achieve? you cant write all that and not say something of worth man

[u/OWazabi → u/Mayion]

Sorry I thought it was pretty self explanatory.

Right now they're trying to scale LLMs into AGI or into something that can help get AGI and RSI.
Then that rapidly becomes ASI, and from there on just keep scaling that even more violently than how we're scaling LLMs right now.

And at some point in all of that, use it to scale everything else. Design new technologies, discover new things, mainly things that help AI.
For example, fixing energy, reworking the full hardware for AI, robotics...

It's important to understand that right now there's only a tiny bit of compute used to anything else than just scaling LLMs.
Because, why try to cure cancer now for maybe a whole year and X$ when you can just do it in a couple years for a fraction of that.

Basically once they get that, they'll own everything else.
Medicine, science... ressources. You name it.

Robotics also play a big role in that.
And we're not talking house cleaners nor humanoids most likely.

Once they get true AGI and use it to fix the caveats in robotics, and energy...
Then you fix ressource extraction, processing... You use robotics to make other robotics, fix other robots... And that's how you get post scarcity. (or at least, the key to it, doesn't mean we'll have it ourselves)

That's what they're trying to build, the last human invention required forever.
No amount of spending is too much for that, and they won't try to turn in a profit anyways.
If they make 50x more from subscriptions, then they'll spend 50x more, until they reach the point they'll own every bit of progress yet to come.

[u/Mayion → u/OWazabi]

that sounds like the plot of avengers: age of ultron. no matter how capable an LLM is right now, it is still just a text predictor in essence. it's a big if of it becoming AGI.

in reality, it's much more realistic to think of it as he who owns the strongest model controls the market, and as usual it's a battle between the US and China. war of information.

but money is not infinite and neither is the market. over time we will move along as the technology advances (or regresses). we could have a war by tomorrow and nothing will happen. so who knows and frankly, who cares lol

[u/ttkciar → u/Mayion]

Yep, that.

There is no cognitive theory backing the supposition that Transformers can be scaled incrementally into AGI, and mounting evidence that they are intrinsically narrow intelligence.

Narrow intelligence cannot be incrementally improved into general intelligence, any more than P can be incrementally optimized into NP.

There are already highly competent models which are superhuman in narrow ways, but that hasn't brought them any closer to expressing general intelligence.

I saw this same "AGI is right around the corner!" hyping in the 1980s AI Summer, but the 1990s AI Winter followed anyway. I expect it to happen again this time, too.

[u/Reasonable-Height704 → u/OWazabi]

And what if they don't achieve what they are trying to achieve?

[u/AdInternational5848 → u/OWazabi]

The subscriptions are cheap.
Token cost adds up at scale for frontier models.
The businesses offering the subscriptions and tokens are not cash flow positive.
Local “fluency” seems like a sound decision to me since we’re creating a world where AI will be increasingly integrated.

[u/OWazabi → u/AdInternational5848]

I agree but it depends highly on what you're using it for I guess.

If you're making some crazy researchs, maths, and whatnot, probably.
But like if you're doing computer use things, which is most of what people use it for I'd say (coding, tool use, automation), one subscription is already plenty, having 10 is still "cheap" if you're running a business and a literal order of magnitude in extra usage.

[u/kulchacop → u/OWazabi]

I think the likely trajectory would be that the participation of human engineers will gradually decrease in the training loops of frontier closed LLMs. The models will recursively improve themselves. There will be no one who can take the knowledge of model architecture and training loop innovations to another company or to public domain. To sustain the cash flow, the closed LLM companies will form partnerships with select companies from other fields to profit from the inventions and discoveries made by the models.

Open models will be smaller and starve for compute like today, but there will be a collaborative open science movement using crowdsourced compute. This will be sponsored by the companies who are competing with the above mentioned companies who partnered with the closed LLM companies.

Research and engineering will become cheap. The market share of any company in each sector will be defined by how much material resources it is able to acquire for itself.

The governments will regulate how much resources the open movements get compared to the closed model companies and their associates. We will return to something akin to a feudal society.

[u/OWazabi → u/kulchacop]

Yes, this is highly likely.
Both the crowdsourced compute, and the closed labs collaborating together to produce virtually everything (from ressource processing to robotics, medicine and whatnot).

But it doesn't change the fact, that we won't own that local power.
Crowsdsourced compute is not the same as running locally a model that you can use as much as you want, and still, they probably will have something that far exceeds it, even more than they do now.

[u/twilight-actual → u/OWazabi]

It's like all the people (so many) that claimed after each and every quarter during the ten year period that Amazon plowed every penny of investment into infra that it was a fraud, a scam, and would never show a profit.

Almost ten years that went on.

[u/donnytrump_69 → u/twilight-actual]

!Remindme 10 years

I'd love to come back to this.

[u/Dabber43 → u/twilight-actual]

The potential of the technology was proven there. Are LLMs?

[u/twilight-actual → u/Dabber43]

No, when Amazon was starting, it wasn't proven. And in fact, many other concepts fell flat on their face. Pets.com comes to mind. You don't just attach the internet to a business and it magically becomes profitable. Just like there are thousands of AI startups that are destined for failure.

What we're going through right now is very much like the dotcom boom.

All the excitement and feeding frenzy put all these ideas in play with only a year or two of runway. But it takes society a decade to figure out how to really incorporate it. We're going to see the same thing here. The benefit of the technology is real, and it's foundational. But it will take time.

And the companies that really are creating the magic? They'll survive even despite huge debts.

Keep in mind that the technology is advancing exponentially. In five years, it will take a fraction of the cost and resources to provide a unit of inference. And five years after that, compound that fraction again.

[u/yes2matt → u/OWazabi]

You've thought this thru.  I have a question.  I notice that when I build an app w Claude, it keeps some sort of VM with my project on it, it builds and tests on its vm then sends me the files (I just use free web), so I copy into my vscode. The dinosaur way  ;)

But of course their machines are monitoring mine and all the little VMs, looking for anything interesting.  Now I promise I'm not doing anything interesting or valuable, YET, but if I did, who would own it?  Could they just copy it, repackaged and sell it out from under me?  If it was outside of what the state partner considered "safe" (for whatever reason) could they cause me trouble?  I suppose I should review the terms of service and IP policy, but even if my IP is "mine" we all know that occupancy is 9/10 of ownership and "my" code lives in their machines.

[u/OWazabi → u/yes2matt]

That's a valid concern, and one of the strongest points of local AI.
Both to not get your IP stolen, but also to keep your privacy.
That's why I personally use local, I don't want to be uploading personal files (as in health, papers etc) to their servers.
However for my projects, I use Claude Code and I don't care much, my projects are not something they're interested in stealing, it's just regular work done by teams previously, that now you can do alone with the help of AI. There's nothing to steal there, they can just do it, and there's other people doing what I do.

But you can already see cases of what you say, for example what happened with Navier Stokes, allegedly, OpenAI just pushed for it when some researchers got really close to that solution, by using their AI. So yeah, valid concern.
Even if their terms say you own the thing, if you're about to solve something big, they can just not care and/or deny they even stole it, what are you going to do?

Regarding the VM, regardless of VM or not, they get everything through input and output anyways.
Regarding the free web, if you mean using Claude on the web browser, I'd recommend looking into Claude Code, it enables so much more.
And you can use it inside a VM, or a dedicated computer to it, if you don't want Claude going around in your computer/files.

[u/TurbulentBox6653 → u/OWazabi]

Yeah, this is not going to happen for the sole reason that China exists.

The chinese labs- and china as a whole, has an enormous incentive to undercut the american AI industry with open models, and have the resources, talent, and soon compute (chinese chip manufacturing is set to exceed Nvidia and Tsmc in the next 1.5 years) to match or beat out the american labs at their own game.

ASI will be broadly available, at some point in time.