This. They can see their valuations slipping. They hope that in a few/several years they will start reaping profits. However, in several years local hardware will be well suited to run models locally at 80-90% efficiency - for "free". You won't need frontier models for daily tasks in a few years. I'd guess.
reply> 80-90% efficiency
replywdym by that
> for daily tasks
which are?
You get about 80-90% of the results for daily tasks like: getting summaries or explanations of complex material. Writing software tools for data analysis. Getting recipes for a given set of ingredients in the fridge.
reply128B-A16B class models at 10-50 tok/s should be plenty for most tasks done on computers
replyWhat do you need a frontier model for, really.
replyFrontier models like Fable are mostly useful if you want to paste in one or two prompts, and receive a subtly broken application that looks impressive. That is very hard to do with local models today.
replyWhat current local models work fine for is delegating clearly-described tasks in a code base the programmer actually understands. Qwen3.6 27B and DeepSeek V4 Flash are both great little workhorses.
There's also GLM 5.2, which is kind of like "store brand Opus", and which might be considered a "near-frontier" model. I don't have as much experience with it.
FWIW Fable is insanely expensive for the task you just described, so much so that I don't think it's practical for that. Its practical use is as a dev lead / architect / project manager model, doing planning and writing detailed feature specs and code reviews while Opus/Codex/Gemini does the actual coding.
replyThey already are. Altman is basically begging the US to buy into OAI, that's just the start. Both OAI and Anthropic are going to have to go down this path or their financials will never work out. Open local models are where the enterprise will need to go for any of this to be cost feasible, but we can almost guarantee this will be a battle nobody using AI will have asked for. You can thank Dario and Sam for the dystopian future that will pad their bottom line!
reply> Altman is basically begging the US to buy
replyWhere did you hear this? All the results I can find say the opposite that the US would buy anything.
If grandparent commenter means in the sense of being an incredibly heavy user of AI, that does not seem to be initiated by Altman or any AI lab as far as I can tell - by January, the Secretary of War (for example) had already announced that he was directing "the Department of War to accelerate America's Military AI Dominance
by becoming an 'AI-first' warfighting force across all components"[1], which in turn was based on Trump's executive order 3 days after taking office (January 23, 2025) ordering the federal government to accelerate AI use[2].
reply[1] https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/2003855671/-1/-1/0/art...
[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202500170/pdf/DCPD-...
If you're assumptions turned out right what would be the benefit to preassume such an undertaking to succeed? As a warning of what to oppose, it imho conveys too much defeatist suggestiveness. Viewed as expression of a latent submissive desire (a perspective that might be offending, my apologies, but hopefully justifyable as food for thought/curiosity) a kent brookman "I for one welcome our new insect overlords" kind of vibe.
replythere will always be higher valuation for company inventing model+1 . no one wants to use latest_model -1 when their competiton is using latest_model.
replyIf neither model+1 or model-1 are providing tangible value to the business does anyone really care, though? At a certain point nobody believes Chicken Little.
replyI get it. These models can be powerful. But will they be useful is a different question.
right. thats the real question. Are models improving meanginflully for ppl to pay a premium for latest model or are they just a commodity.
replyi would argue that no one knows answer to that yet.
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replydeleted
replyThis whole situation is very reminiscent of how Microsoft was trying to get Linux and open source banned when NT started losing market share on the server.
replytheir desperation says alot about the viability of their business.
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