So, that’s the best we’ll ever get?

The companies that replaced employees with AI are already entering the “find out” stage.

Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate

Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you’re willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.

The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :

• Regulatory capture, hence all the press releases of basic and frankly embarrassing sandbox failures and “we need to slow down” talk to try and get that rolling, and
• Banning of those nasty, evil, non-US models in the name of national security.

And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit’s not gonna fly.

I’m sure they will keep hardware exorbitantly expensive for as long as possible to push ppl to the subscription model. I would love to run local models, but the cost of hardware versus performance is too high compare to cloud at this point in time. I might break even in 5-10 years, but the hardware may be out of date by then. I hope things will level out in a few years. And I agree the us gov will try to ban non-us models and hardware. They may even bail out the ai companies because they will be too big to fail. Also expect ai and robot companies to get massive military contracts.

I run Qwen 3.8 27B, which seems pretty comparable to Sonnet 5 for coding and other tasks. Qwen 3.6 was in the neighborhood of Sonnet 4.6. Qwen 4 27B is supposed to drop in the next couple months and we’ll see how it compares to Sonnet 5.5, which benchmarks at Fable / Mythos level.

If the trend keeps up, not sure how useful those data centers will be when a gaming PC is a few months behind the frontier.

Why do you think they’re doing ethics promises now? I have a feeling that all the third party models are going to fail the ethics tests and now that nvidia owns huggingface it’ll be very easy to ban them in the states.

Download your models now

Yep, I assume that’s the plan, though HuggingFace isn’t the only game in town. Hugging Bay, ModelScope, and I assume a horde of others will fill the void if HF goes downhill.

If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere.

And, in last 2 weeks, the 2 leading US labs have reduced prices. Trend is going the opposite way.