One of my hopes is that when the AI bubble bursts, some brave person will sneak out a copy of the last frontier model.

Aboutplants 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not worried about that, you will only have to wait 3-6 months and get a Chinese model just as good.

That’s misunderstanding why these models are behind. A large part of why they’re behind is they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps that takes a pre-trained model and turns it into a frontier model like GPT 5 or Opus. Instead they do their best to recreate these models using distillation.

Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier.

[edit, after thinking about it I think my phrasing is unfair. It's not necessarily that aren't able to do it, but they haven't yet shown that they are willing to do it.]

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computerex 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s not remotely true. They did distillation as a cheap solution to the cold start problem. You need data/trajectories to hill climb to higher capabilities. All large Chinese labs do RLAIF.

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sulam an hour ago | parent [-]

Oh yes, not remotely true. Which is why the frontier labs all have invested heavily in trying to identify and thwart distillers, using known company names / domains to drive their exclusion lists.

	▲	logicchains an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's cheaper to distill than to do reinforcement learning, so of course they prefer that, but if it wasn't an option they could just pay up and spend more GPU time on RL.

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FpUser 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>"they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps"

Not yet.

If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.

	▲	sulam an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'll agree I guess and clarify that the better phrasing is probably something like "haven't yet shown the capability to."

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yorwba 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Chinese companies giving away expensive models for free is a symptom of the AI bubble, too. It's not a law of nature that they'll always be able to scrounge up the money for yet another training run.

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gpm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Shaping the tool that does the thinking is quite valuable when you're in the business of changing how people think - I think we can expect propaganda agencies to be subsidizing model creation forever.

This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.

	▲	rvnx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		All the models, have to respect their local laws, and most of all, pressure from users and the employees. They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values. https://pastebin.com/hjhvsBFg This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous

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jnwatson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As long as it is in the CCP's national interest to have a frontier model, Chinese companies will have the resources for another training run.

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nextos 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement.

China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.

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fastball 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If it's a bubble, why do you care about frontier models?

	▲	FpUser 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Internet was a bubble, so was telecom etc. at some point. Being bubble does not mean that when 90% of investments go down the drain the remains are not useful.

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thx67 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Prediction markets can solve this.

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zuzululu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

which will be very difficult to run unless you have a large budget to operate your own mini datacenter

	▲	lelanthran an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In a crash the hardware will go for pennies on the dollar, if not for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Lots of companies will pick them up for scrap metal prices and host them for fractions of what we are paying today. That's the nature of bubbles.