As soon as you can demonstrate decent financial returns (ie. the AI can run a company better than humans can), suddenly it makes sense to put a lot more $$$ in even if returns are diminishing - since whoever runs companies the best gets control of a big chunk of the world economy.

If you're actually applying LLMs, all of the things around the LLM that adapt it to coding, for example, that enable it to use existing validation tools for code, and enable it to diagnose and fix tool chain issues that aren't directly coding problems, are what makes the difference between a model that that scores a little higher on a coding benchmark and a model that's useful in a particular code base on a particular platform.

Are there any use cases that have enabled one customer of a frontier LLM to outperform a competitor using a different frontier LLM? Or is this why we are seeing confected points of comparison like solving challenge problems in mathematics?

I'm afraid it might be the other way around. RSI might pick all of the low hanging fruit soon. There must be a physical limit of how much intelligence you can squeeze out of some amount of parameters and compute.

There are going to still be worthwhile improvements but they are going to be more like not how to make transformers 10x cheaper but how to make next training run cost 9 trillions instead of 10 with a very particular optimization designed at the cost of hundreds of millions for this one specific run.

Don't worry, AI boosters will be in here soon denigrating anyone that uses anything but the latest and greatest models as irrelevant.

Build Nuclear, Build Thorium the Chinese are building whatever they can. They’re not locked in by special interest. Is that because they have lots of engineers on the job in government?

Training location is flexible. Iceland?

Europe has lots of zero-cost windows for electricity, and areas with cheap prices. The real issue is access to oil and gas.

France is actually pretty cheap in Europe. About 15% more than average USA electric prices (but I know that varies a lot across the states so still likely much more than the cheaper areas)