alt Hacker NewsBecause they're trying very hard not to understand it.
Otherwise the expensive-yet-powerful model probably won't see much revenue. How much money is there in bleeding edge scientific research? There's a lot, but there's even more existing capital in paying people people to do college level paperwork, and the bulk of those traffic gets routed to the cheapest model.
You mostly don't need super powerful AGI to replace the paper pushers, but the frontier labs are trying to position themselves as being uniquely capable of producing super powerful AGI, and also be the ones replacing office workers.
Not sure how it will work out for them, but I think model routing is going to poke holes in that narrative. That's why I think they're trying very hard not to understand model routing exists.
Replies
Is there really that much money in bleeding edge scientific research though?
This is what terrifies me about this whole ordeal economically. Maybe we get AGI and it is not worth anything close to what we thought it was for those who have a bet on it.
I think of what was the direct, economic value in the betting sense of quantum mechanics or relativity? Huge value at the systems level of society but as you scale down towards the individual the value is more and more dispersed to the point I would think any pool of bets would have all not paid off.
You can't monopolize and commoditize relativity.
I almost think there is a kind of dutch book against the AI equity holder because even in the best case scenario the bet doesn't pay off anything close to what is expected for an individual bet.
It wasn’t long ago at all that the chief problem was “can AI even help me with this” (cost be damned). Until a time when the answer is an unmitigated “yes, obviously”, the frontier labs have everything to lose and nothing to gain on routing, because if they screw it up you might incorrectly decide “nope, it can’t help yet” due to a poor routing decision.