Only the AI labs are really interested in closed models. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, ... they'd rather go back to doing stock buybacks and being ridiculously profitable rather than raising capital for all this research and datacenters. They only do it because they think they have to.

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mcmcmc 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The alternative is ceding the leading edge to China and being dependent on them to continue releasing advances

	▲	chrsw an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We did this with manufacturing and industrial build outs over the last 4 decades or so. It worked out very well for capital, not well for labor. One could make the argument we can do the same for AI. Let China build the models and we capture the value somewhere in the layers above. I think that’s a terrible idea but financially it makes just as much sense as offshoring labor and manufacturing, if not more.
	▲	skohan an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Isn't this meta release kind of a counterexample to that?

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mrDmrTmrJ an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

If the leading model companies aren't profitable long-term, how do we get the money to continually spend on more research and more compute?

I get that plenty of people don't like big corporations or stock buybacks or certain CEOs, which is fine. But as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER, I really want to see a clear financial reason for maximal AGI investment.

If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

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sanderjd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What I think is that something the "exponential scaling to AGI" thesis pays too little attention to is resource constraints, and that this is the answer to your question. What will happen if it becomes difficult to sustain the investment of resources necessary to continuously train newer and better models is that the s-curve will start to inflect toward plateau, just like any other technology.

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nradov 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's a non sequitur. While the frontier LLMs are quite useful for many tasks there's no reliable evidence that scaling them up will ever produce a true AGI. More likely some other fundamental research breakthroughs will be needed, and those breakthroughs won't necessarily come from the current leading companies. I doubt that more money would be necessary or even helpful in that.

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mirekrusin 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

There is no reliable evidence they won’t.

Look at rate of progress, not today’s capabilities alone.

The gap is shrinking, many tasks are already performed at super human level.

Humanity doesn’t have monopoly on intelligence - it seems obvious to me it’ll be reached and surpassed without hard upper limit.

	▲	nradov 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		OK well then let's check back here in a few years to see if any of them managed to build an AGI. Until then it's just idle speculation. Anything could happen ... or not.

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munk-a an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If the model labs aren't clearly profitable, or open source models eat all the 'model layer' profit - what financial force will push forward very expensive experiments/scaling, etc.?

It's hype - when the hype dies the great push will slow.

My hypothesis is that we'll end up with something like Seti@Home where continued model training gets outsourced to a benevolent appearing product (something like what OpenAI started out as). If I were to bet - Europe and Canada seem best poised (especially the latter) to produce an AGI initiative with a strong ethical focus.

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

Out of curiosity why do you want AGI to ‘happen FASTER’?

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

Why do you think your life will be better with AGI?

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KPGv2 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> as someone who wants to see AGI happen FASTER

I think you'll find very few people here sympathetic to misanthropic (ba dum tss) goals like yours. It's evident at this point that AGI will destroy economies, democracy, and upward mobility. There is no Star Trek future. There is only an Elysium future with AGI.