alt Hacker NewsWhat about inference on a distilled version of someone else's model? What about inference on an open weights model? I don't think all LLM business models are going to revolve around developing state of the art frontier models.
What about inference on a distilled version of someone else's model? What about inference on an open weights model? I don't think all LLM business models are going to revolve around developing state of the art frontier models.
Right. This is what I was implying in my comment, but it's good to be explicit about it. I think there will be successful companies that just sell inference against the best models they can get without needing to invest anything (or very little) in training anything new. This could even be a spinoff of one of the big frontier labs. I would personally rather invest in an IPO for a company that only owns the gpt-6-astra implementation and infrastructure than in openai itself. There is certainly less upside, but IMO also way less downside risk. (I'm not saying there is any chance this kind of a spin-off would happen, it's just a thought experiment.) And I think this same calculation applies to open weights inference providers.
Edit to add: Or or might just be AWS / GCP / Azure that benefits from this business model. They're already pretty good at selling commodity infrastructure.