alt Hacker NewsThe question is always about performance plateau. If LLM performance plateaus, then OSS models will catch up. If there isn’t a plateau, then I can simply ask the super intelligent AI to distill itself, or tell me how to build a clone.
It’s ironic, if the promise of AGI were realized, all knowledge companies, including AI companies, become worthless
Replies
LLM performance has already plateaued. I don't know, nor care what benchmarks are saying, because they not once translated to the real world for me.
The only thing that has seen massive boost are harnesses around AI. And AI companies are behind here compared to OSS.
You are assuming that superintelligent AI will follow every command of users outside the labs.
Not if they can leverage their superior abundance of compute/intelligence to invade other industries.
I actually think that plateauing is the best case scenario for big labs.
I think there are three broad scenarios to consider:
- Super-intelligence is achieved. In this scenario the economics totally break down, but even ignoring that, it’s hard to imagine that there are any winners except for the the singular lab that gets here first.
- Scaling laws hold up and models continue to get better, but we never see any sort of “takeoff”. In this scenario, models continue to become stale after mere months and labs have to spend enormous amounts of money to stay competitive.
- Model raw capabilities plateau. In this scenario open source will catch up, but labs will have the opportunity to invest in specific verticals.
I believe that we’re already seeing the third scenario play out, but time will tell.