alt Hacker NewsThat can all be true but the frontier models will still have a huge market. You're thinking of all tasks as a fixed pie. The top 1% of intelligence opens up a whole new pie, stuff nobody does today because it's too expensive: daily cancer scans instead of one every few years, asteroid mining missions that need ten thousand PhD-hours of planning, custom drugs designed for your specific tumor, a personal lawyer and doctor for every person on earth, auditing every line of code in every bank and hospital continuously and so on.
Replies
Yes, agree that token consumption will increase exponentially for the next while.
Disagree that the frontier model is where the economic gains will be realized.
The smaller the relative gap between frontier and non-frontier/open weights, the less pricing power.
This gap has shown only to shrink over time, not expand.
Businesses will pay more for frontier, but not meaningfully more to justify the economics. It's always going to be a low margin business, perhaps outside of cyber security, warfare/intelligence and perhaps drug discovery.
Though the expensive and time consuming part of drugs is doing the trials and getting approval, not coming up with ideas
Wouldn't daily cancer scans give you cancer from all the radiation? I thought that's why the doc hides behind a wall when giving an X-ray.
yea you see no body are vibecoding games before opus 5 and astra, after they are released games basically got commoditized
> daily cancer scans instead of one every few years
Silly nitpick: the reason we don’t do daily cancer scans isn’t the cost, it’s the false positive rate. Invasive procedures like biopsies come with complications like infections that happen at a higher rate and do more damage than the cancer that doesn’t even exist. This dilemma is pervasive in medicine, because our tests aren’t perfect but the thing they’re testing for is rare.