> lowest energy costs will likely be able to dictate market prices

This is a good insight. I think everyone has seen that chart China's electricity generation going parabolic vs the US. That combined with cheaper yet equally good talent means at least in that segment, the closed labs won't catch up anytime soon

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rgbrenner 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> China's electricity generation going parabolic

Even if we all switch to Chinese models, the west isn't going to be running the model on Chinese servers... and the majority of costs are from inference.

> cheaper yet equally good talent

China has tech talent, but this isn't a 3rd world developing nation. Chinese AI researchers are getting paid $10M+ USD/year salaries.

Also they're equally good, but somehow consistently behind?

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CuriouslyC 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Training models is as much art as science at this point. There's no gap in scientific acumen at Chinese labs, but the US has more real world experience in the art of training large models, and the US has the capital allocation lead.

	▲	Npovview 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but when the Heads of CCP make something their target they chase it with all their might. Read the recent news of the fact that Chinese AI researchers can't leave China. China is now going after the Diamond industry of India.

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andsoitis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the closed labs won't catch up anytime soon

Which closed labs won’t catch up to whom?

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GodelNumbering 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I should have expanded, but basically, the OSS models becoming more and more capable to solve all day to day SWE coding needs will take a cut from frontier labs revenue.

Not to say that frontier labs won't make progress, but the bar for a sufficiently capable agent is all the OSS models need to meet to make this happen. I imagine a lot of hybrid setups where something like Opus is used only for planning/architecture, and anecdotally, the real token consuming part is implementation not architecture.

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frank_nitti 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not my comment, but I’d venture to guess they’re referring to the likes of DeepSeek et al, who are/will be able to host their top-tier inference infra more efficiently

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seniorivn 3 hours ago | parent [-]

right now the most likely outcome is that they are going to host locally produced much more power hungry chips, and even if the lead on electricity production will stay, it will be eaten by inefficiency of the hardware.

	▲	CuriouslyC 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Unlikely. We have a big lead in terms of general computing devices, but China can leapfrog us with ASICs. They might still lag in the training space for a while but in terms of serving inference, USA is absolutely COOKED at the low-mid end.

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narrator 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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