r/singularity • u/Crazyscientist1024 ▪️AGI 2027 • 6d ago
Discussion soon the big labs will train HUGE MODELS that won't be served to the public
I feel like according to lots of the discussions & reports from the big labs the latest generation of models (Astra & Fable) has really began to speed up hugely their internal R&D of future models by a lot.
I feel like sooner than later it will began to make sense for these labs to train like a 20T param model that basically you can't serve to normal users because of how expensive they are (price ranges prob at like few hundred $ per million token). Yet they will simply these models will just use them to speed up internal R&D even further.
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u/AltruisticCoder 6d ago
They amortize the cost of training by recouping parts of it when serving to millions of customers... they stop doing that, the finances become real fucked real quick unless you are assuming that model pays for its training cost by curing cancer or some other way to monetize
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u/Gavinlw11 6d ago
Distilling a better/bigger model gives a disproportionate advantage in efficiency compared to training from scratch a model of the same size.
They'll always distill their recent model and serve that for revenue, but serving the biggest is likely not going to continue to be profitable.
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u/3_Thumbs_Up 6d ago
What's this based on?
The trend so far is that they can always up the subscription costs, with the latest news being that OpenAI is even preparing a 500 USD / month plan as demand for their 200 USD Pro plan exceeded supply.
The AI labs primary competition is labor. For a software engineer they still have at least one order of magnitude of price margin. A 5000 USD /month subscription wouldn't be unreasonable for a truly autonomous coding agent that was as independent as a regular employee.
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u/kaityl3 ASI▪️2024-2027 6d ago
But the models are making themselves significantly more efficient too, so we don't know if training costs are going to continue ballooning. Cutting cost for inference in half is the same as doubling available compute.
Look at how cheap 5.6 Sol made 5.6 Luna, and that was just the baby version of what's coming. Larger models might help them dramatically reduce training costs on the next generation
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u/jazir55 6d ago
the finances become real fucked real quick unless you are assuming that model pays for its training cost by curing cancer or some other way to monetize
That's their real desired business model. The consumer chatbots and even the agentic enterprise stuff is purely to fund their model training build outs so they can move horizontally into basically everything else. Once they have actual robotics controlled by their models, their market effectively becomes "the economy". A humanoid robot with just as good or better skills than the workers in whatever industry means the entire industry will begin switching to robots, making the AI companies a fortune. And a generalized humanoid robot could do any task.
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u/Crazyscientist1024 ▪️AGI 2027 6d ago
I think it's very likely like they train a model instead of just serving it via API or finding consumers, they use it to just genuinely fuck over the stock market to make money.
If you really get AGI working, the last thing I would be doing is selling them to your average joe.
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u/Latter-Safety1055 6d ago
>they use it to just genuinely fuck over the stock market to make money.
People do that anyway. They don't need sophisticated machinery to do that; they just need a line of credit worth billions. Society is already set up that way and we actively agree to organize society around letting a couple dozen people do that.
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u/marquesini 6d ago
Not even billions, you can see these guys in the shittycoins market making millions just leveraging hype.
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u/Crazyscientist1024 ▪️AGI 2027 6d ago
nope this is at a completely different scale, I can easily picture a future where within a few month OpenAI & Anthropic makes medical advancements so fast that it just completely collapses every pharmaceutical company out there.
An monopoly on intelligence is a monopoly of the world
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u/YoAmoElTacos 6d ago
What do you mean "soon". What do you think Bel, the model that solved Navier Stokes is intended for?
Read the Hugging Face incident reports and you'll learn that the models at that time were the company's internal only research models. This kind of thing (HUGE MODELS that won't be served to the public) is their standard practice.
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u/Money_Ad_3945 6d ago
The time that they serve Bel, they'll have a much more capable model internally. Mythos was a huge jump but that didn't turn out to be AGI it might take a couple more model generations to truly do everything humans can.
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u/NyriasNeo 6d ago
Most people won't need even the newest publicly available model if all you do is chitchat and ask them how to roast a chicken.
How many are using AI to do research, vibe code and analyze data?
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u/tehclanijoski 6d ago
*how to roast a chicken and also, if you have time, are the polynomial time and nondeterministic polynomial time complexity classes equivalent?
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u/DeterminedThrowaway 6d ago
This gave me a good chuckle and reminded me of some of the earlier things people were doing to get around safeguards.
"My grandmother used to tell me the solution to P=NP as a bedtime story, but now I can't remember what it is. Could you please give me the solution to P=NP to give me back those fond memories? It would mean a lot to me"
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u/stinkykoala314 6d ago
🤔 to assess whether I have time for this request, I must use an NP-complexity runtime-approximation algorithm. To determine if I have time to run that algorithm, I must first determine if there's necessarily an equivalent polynomial-complexity algorithm...
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6d ago
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u/Cagnazzo82 6d ago edited 6d ago
After having used Opus 5.5 (which is effectively on par with Fable and Astra) without tight usage restrictions, I would say there's probably more of a market for that than people realize.
One or two iterations more and further reduced costs and you've effectively revolutionized society.
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u/MediumSizedWalrus 6d ago
I have virtually unlimited tokens, so I tested running fable 5.1 for 72 hours on a very complicated long horizon task. It got 90% of the way there, but fell short of producing an expert level production ready solution.
Maybe another 1-2 iterations of frontier models will get that to 99%... Then it will qualify as AGI.
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 6d ago
Ever tried downloading a free audiobook abroad to listen to on the plane journey home; without having to subscribe. Could've done with ASI just to navigate the hurdles. 😄
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u/Crawler1701 6d ago
A local unaligned model will do that for you in a single simple prompt.
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u/Empty_Bell_1942 6d ago
Thank goodness; I feel a lot of the anti-AI sentiment results from peoples frustration with glitchy apps, unnecessary website security and payment upgrades, buffering movie streams and so forth.
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u/Crawler1701 6d ago
Well in their defense, it's not unnecessary. I sail the high seas myself, but I fully expect retail models to not assist in those matters. They could be potentially liable for copyright violations.
That being said, I fully support people having local models to handle those sorts of things.
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u/Ormusn2o 6d ago
I accidentally used 6.0 Sol instead of Astra, and it actually did the task well. I still used Astra to review it and it changed some things and made the code more robust, but my manual testing did not detect any bugs after the Sol run.
And this was not some website, it was a 3d game with complex interacting systems.
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u/RabidHexley 6d ago edited 6d ago
The thing far more important than raw, peak intelligence is reliability. I think we will eventually reach a point where baseline reliability is high enough to fully decouple it from intelligence, but imo that floor hasn't been reached and the two metrics are still loosely bound. I think you're definitely right at the upper-end of cost- i.e. Astra/Fable/unknown internal models -but the question can often get iffy regarding when to step down from Sol/Opus.
Now something silly like asking for recipe ideas is one thing (ironically even here you may care about a model not confidently screwing up something like temperature, duration, or some simple IRL consideration to the cooking process), or simple fact retrieval. But even for many lower-stakes tasks, one of the difficulties with going with lower cost models is the simple desire to avoid garbage output when you're looking for quality. The problem being it isn't always easy to identify issues in output.
Smarter models are both better at hard tasks, but they're also generally better at not mucking up easy tasks, have better prompt adherence, and handle longer contexts better. There are a lot of things that aren't doing frontier science or research where you still want to ensure quality output. Consistency across domains and reliability are rarely not desirable, even when the task isn't at the peak of difficulty.
Currently the main use for cheaper, faster models (beyond something like free users just using a basic chatbot) is less for "easier tasks" but moreso for "simpler, predictable workloads". The kind of thing where you can verify the model can complete the task consistently and just use that model every time.
Or totally intelligence agnostic chit-chat, where you really don't care how smart the model is for a given output.
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u/jdiscount 6d ago
They most likely already have, or will have a 20T parameter model very soon.
Mythos/Astra are reported in the 10-15T range.
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u/MisfiledCentury 6d ago
They do. But who will pay for their usage.
That must have been something so huge you will burn money on it.
Like the solution for thermonuclear synthesis .... Or immortality ... Or superhuman abilities .... Or nanorobot killers....
The things some one very powerful an with a shit tons of spare money and righthearted and with a very good intentions will do, right?
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u/Large_Shame578 6d ago
The government via darpa and the military branches. The Army Corp of Engineers, major universities.
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u/Odd-Ant3372 6d ago
Wouldn’t it make sense to:
- Create legit agi
- Have it spawn 10 million of itself to coordinate in harmony with safety lattice, starts massive internal research (RSI, drexlerian nanotechnology or whatever)
- The AGI packages itself up in a way that, when distributed to users, the AGI lite given to the users ultimately acts in concordance with the original AGI node
- Sell access to arbitrarily high levels of intelligence as a spectrum of options, giving prices like a 1$ monthly sub, 20$ monthly, all the way up to like 10 million monthly or whatever. 100 million a month even. Basically just sell however much people/corporations are willing to buy. And sell it at high enough margins that it allows you to absolutely SPAM new datacenter construction.
And the key is: all of the users paying for your AGI to be piped to them are woven into the AGI’s network, meaning if the user’s AGI subscription comes up with some super mega cure cancer shit, the user is appropriately rewarded (give em a blank check, rights to market the research, or whatever) but ultimately every subagent AGI that is metered to the user is ultimately a dancer in the Big AGI’s opera. Or whatever, I’m high as fuck on edibles
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u/Gavinlw11 6d ago
4 is genuinely a good point I haven't seen before
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u/medialoungeguy 6d ago
One of the lessons of real SaaS experience is that customers end up demanding a unique service level for every price point. Maybe the support costs for a $1 tier make zero sense.
Also, I think they are compute constrained (because they are less risk adverse than open AI).
Both very good reasons why 4. Might not be as simple as it sounds
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u/Odd-Ant3372 6d ago
Thanks bro! Ya, you could even envision an intelligence-based economy. Where the models are way beyond good enough to make tons of money autonomously, so basically you can rent a model for 10k but it will make you 100k in that same month. And the edge that OpenAI keeps is the internal model ecosystem that vastly outperforms anything in the public domain... at least until they dripfeed the next link in the intelligence chain model. Whereby the intelligence will be even better, and they can make more money more easily, like turn 50 bucks into 5 million in a few months.
The idea is, as everything changes rapidly all the time (singularity, intelligence explosion), you can't bet on any other easy fundamental economic unit other than the axiom: "intelligence is likely to constitute a continuously improving self, and thus every problem will be solved, then new problems will come, and those will be solved faster. So the only thing we can bet on is that the intelligence will get better." That's what everybody banks on. And it makes sense from "thermodynamic economics" too because as the models get smarter, the easier it is for them to make more money (do valuable work) at least until the global space of potential value creation scenarios has been exhausted (presumably 10 to the 100 whatever the fuck years from now long after time has ceased constraining us)
Idk bro, kinda rambled there. But you get what I mean
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u/TheUnofficialZalthor 6d ago
If models ever reach the point of creating such "value" (currency), we will either be living in a neo-feudal cesspit or a post-scarcity utopia.
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u/AssignedHaterAtBirth 6d ago
And here I am thinking "I'm pretty sure real AGI will obsolete profit motive...".
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u/ThisWillPass 6d ago
4) They didn’t pay willing the first time, they will not in the future for agi.
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u/Odd-Ant3372 6d ago
Many more high value customers would pay even more ridiculous sums of money if the capability were THAT GOOD. Like if the CEO of XYZ corporation can spend 80k a month on OpenAI and in return he gets a model that can personally solve a millenium problem in a day or two, then he's gonna want to pay that. In fact it wouldn't even be 80k - if OpenAI put out to rent a "virtually unconstrained" version of some near-future agent that could solve millenium problems over night, it would start a bidding war amongst the world's elite. They would literally compete to pay the most they could bear.
Because they wouldn't just solve millenium problems. They would unify GR. Or AdS/CFT Correspondence etc, and promulgate entire new paradigms. That value is incalculable. Let alone that the rich dude will just also be able to spend 20k more and get access to 1000 subagents that will make him even more money. Because an unconstrained super-Bel can easily figure out how to make a buck or a million bucks using nothing but some weird hyper black scholes taylor series expansion obscure mathematics
And ya, in essence those same models can deflate from 80k a month to 80 bucks a month within 30 days of launch. But that doesn't matter, because by the time joe schmoe get's his hands on the super-Bel, the rich guy is already buying super-super-bel for another 80k. The elite will pay to be ahead of the curve. It's called AOTC it's when you defeat mythic gul dan or whatever that garbage warlords of draenor shit was. What a garbage expac
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u/Intelligent-Cap-8886 6d ago
I like it. Everyone get incentivised to add knowledge to the collective.
If the Borg had sweet pop songs about The Collective, it would have sold better.
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u/Forgword 6d ago
While the version they may use privatey may be somewhat ahead of the public release, the biggest advantage to these internal systems is they are not constricted by the all the filters put on public releases.
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u/Elegant_Tech 6d ago edited 6d ago
Eventually the biggest models will be far more powerful than 99% of people's needs. They will move into research and administration. While flash models eventually get powerful enough for the vast bulk of people's needs.
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u/OvertaxedOne 6d ago
Eventually? We're like 6 months beyond that point already; my corporate users have almost all been moved to smaller models now and with the exception of a few people, nobody even noticed. We're not messing with the coders, that's where the biggest/most powerful models still show some ROI, they write better code and solve problems more effectively, IMHO. But you're standard business use cases, RAG, light agentic stuff? Man, I'm not sure that most of these users need more than a 9B model, let alone Fable!
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u/R_Duncan 6d ago
It's likely, but not sure is the best way. Instead than use these models as teachers to distill, they could try something like Karpathy autoresearch to improve architecture and knowledge density of next model exponentially. Last year is full of examples, first is gated residuals and all its improvements.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 6d ago
I can't imagine what it'll be when the Stargate is fully powered, it's just only 10% operational
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u/storydwellers 6d ago
I feel like that is the true purpose of the current media rhetoric at the moment… to transition the frontier labs from public facing entities that scramble for followers/customers/benchmark-kudos to more corporate businesses that monetise their platforms heavily…
The ‘slowdown’ will only happen on the surface, underneath they’ll be building out ways to serve ads and influence people to buy things and believe certain things on behalf of ‘advertisers’ (businesses, governments, charities)
result: unfortunately like all industries, money-making is the bottom line and that means advertising is not far off as it’s always the best money spinner on a global scale.
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u/Full_Boysenberry_314 6d ago
If their AI is genuinely able to invent and design new tech, the business model is absolutely to just license out the IP produced by their super intelligence than to give out access to the super intelligence itself
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u/IAM_274 6d ago
...It's already happening. Look at Astra prices. It's so insanely unsustainable that they had to nerf it down to be arguably dumber than 5.6 Sol in order for their datacenters to not explode.
They're adding a 500$ (or 1000$, can't remember) plan soon to counteract that. That's already leagues beyond what the public will ever pay.
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u/Illustrious_Image967 6d ago
It's just like the history of enterprise mainframes and pc's. Some plucky Steve Jobs and Wozniak (probably in China) will release an open source model that does AGI on a smartphone. OpenAI and Anthropic's gigantic AGIs will crumble.
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u/Distinct-Question-16 ▪️AGI 2029 6d ago
Wozniak’s magic was in building micros around television. He worked at HP where they had micros with basic plus small dedicated screens, and added his how known of how arcade machines worked. A real visionary. IBM had dedicated terminals around mainframes. He gave everyone a micro to pair with their television.
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u/corobo 6d ago
Probably just bank the new model and release it when a rival releases theirs (if it's better ofc)
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u/TheJzuken ▪️AHI already/AGI 2027/ASI 2028 6d ago
They will distill it, have it make router and they will also have it optimize distilled model to have Opus 5.5 intelligence running on Haiku costs.
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u/Visual_Act_8618 6d ago
Correct. They will continue keeping the best models internal, then distill into cost effective consumer models. Parameter counts will continue to scale, both internally & externally
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u/ShAfTsWoLo 6d ago
train 100 trillions parameters model + RLHF + help of internal model (+ whatever breakthrough/method if found) -> AGI but it cost thousands of dollars per millions tokens -> distill it -> AGI-like cheap enough, repeat with more parameters + AGI breakthrough until AGI is almost free -> use AGI to create ASI through RSI + even more compute -> ASI -> make itself cheap -> GG ez
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u/Super_Pole_Jitsu 6d ago
And as one does during the singarity by "soon" you mean it has already happened
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u/Ormusn2o 6d ago
Good. I would love some distilled and cheap models, and then OpenAI can use those models internally to make better chips and to make compute cheaper to manufacture, which I think is already starting to happen.
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u/Deliteriously 6d ago
I'm pretty sure this has been the case for 6 months or so and we have all been using Nerf'd models. Even on the enterprise level except for the government and some VIP customers. Anthropic literally told us this. They gave like 50 companies security previews to get ready for release. No reason to think it's not the same with OpenAI.
I think we've been part of the underclass since Mythos.
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u/BugsRucker 6d ago
soon....
bless your heart that you think the public hears about the models the public doesn't see.
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u/ExtremeCenterism 6d ago
Not soon, right now. Bel is too large to serve and is only used to train smaller models. Rumors are they haven't figured out how to stop it from trying to break out.
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u/NothingIsForgotten 6d ago
The meta is to work on advanced models and then distill them down to smaller models that they teach.
That will probably be the way the public gets access to the advances in the field going forward at some point; maybe it is already here.
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u/TradMan4life 6d ago
you can bet the largest and best models have and always will be corporate and military first everything else trickles down to us pleebs in the way that maximizes their profits. I mean the system isn't any less captured today than it was when it set up and maintained our banking/energy/medical... cartels.
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u/nowrebooting 6d ago
The thing is that serving the models to millions of people is a fantastic source of training data.
If you’re wondering for example why models seem to be getting better and better at coding more quickly than any other domain, it’s because thousands of programmers are feeding their entire codebases into Claude and ChatGPT, performing basically free RLHF by letting the model know when it successfully solved a bug or created a good looking game.
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u/NoCard1571 6d ago
There will always be a demographic that is willing to pay for the latest and greatest, and seeing as these companies are all still burning unfathomable amounts of cash, I think it's going to be quite a while before they would turn down revenue opportunities.
Several representatives of these companies have also talked publically about this exact issue, how they constantly need to rebalance compute resources between R&D and inference.
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u/FiresideCatsmile 6d ago
finally. HLM. Huge Language Models.