alt Hacker News> We are at the mercy of frontier labs for access to SOTA LLMs
I disagree with this use of SOTA, and this topic is why.
Anthropic and OpenAI have “cutting-edge” models. These are beyond the state of the art but they are closed, secretive, hard to quantify.
The “state of the art” is open source, open weights models that can be inspected, studied, shared and critiqued, because that is what is meant by “the art” —- it is the knowledge and principles and evidence and materials available to all. The “state of the art” is the highest point of that.
I wish we could make this distinction and stop blessing two secretive, unverifiable loss-making companies with so much power.
(Putting that aside, I suspect — without evidence, mind you - that the endless march to solving models by making them bigger is not the solution anyway.)
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Sorry but I think you’re requirement that something only be “the art” if any arbitrary person can critique it is off. The frontier labs are working on the state of the art but it’s just art that you aren’t allowed to see. Unfortunately.
SOTA LLMs is less important than cheap token and Chinese AI labs is releasing model that is only about 6-8 months behind American AI labs.
Chinese's model like GLM is getting better for coding task and its cheaper. Microsoft Github copilot have to switch billing to token based. the cost of AI have increased since agent come into play. whoever can offer cheaper token to do task will win.
even Microsoft is looking into Deepseek for cheap token.
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/16/microsoft-copilot-cowork-to...