alt Hacker News> because their improvements are stagnating as they hit financial and technical challenges.
I don't mean to be rude, but how is it even possible for someone to hold this opinion in mid-2026?
Can you explain why you believe this?
Replies
Why would someone hold the opposite opinion?
It’s much more likely that our current approach to large language models for general use will eventually show diminishing improvements (even if you think it hasn’t yet), than the opposite situation where valuable improvements can be made forever.
The threat of distillation and efficiency gains from competitors mean that providing value at the top end of the market is an existential necessity for these labs. I don’t think they can do that forever and, in my opinion, for the vast majority of use cases we’ve already reached very little improvement for new models when compared with available offerings.
Basically, continuously building out compute is costing these labs enormous amounts of money, which VCs and other companies have been bankrolling in order for them to develop powerful models.
So if the new models they can develop right now are less frontier, it could be a net loss on their balance sheets.
How can you not believe it? Neither of them are even close to making a profit and the market is saturated with cheaper alternatives.
This is a ploy for regulatory capture.
I don't think the technical aspect is true, performance has been growing fairly consistently, but the financial aspect, or more accurately the logistical aspect, is plausible; with competition as fierce as it currently is, for how long can they keep growing at the same pace? People can't afford RAM anymore and datacenter build outs aren't particularly popular, OAI has been doubling compute capacity every 7 months for the past 3 years, it's just physically impossible for this to go on for long, something has to give.
And this is not to say that the tech isn't revolutionary or the demand isn't there, it's simply just currently too competitive, and to avoid getting into anti trust trouble they need to involve the government.
Note this being a plausible doesn't necessarily make it true, for all I know they could have witnessed some safety incident and decided they need a pause, or maybe it's both reasons.