this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
885 points (99.2% liked)
Funny
16257 readers
2100 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They could if investors were happy with good enough and didn’t need to release a mediocre update every 8 weeks. Plenty of folks would be happy with opus 4.8 for the next few years and a $20 a month sub.
You seem to misunderstand "opus 4.8 and $20 a month" IS the reason why they are unprofitable.
They already got the data and GPUs and lots of researchers doing research. In fact, since gpt-4o they have been trying to make these models smaller and more profitable.
But at the present moment, they just can't beat chinese models on efficiency cuz that's what those companies were focusing on from the begining due to gpu export law US put.
The Chinese models were also developed later and allegedly didn't have to focus so hard on the initial acquisition of training data, so were able to build their models completely differently.
Think of it like developing dictionary technology. For the first dictionary, the hardest part is finding all the words that need to be defined. After that it's just a matter of adding new words occasionally as they're found.
That's the "theft" the Western AI companies accused the Chinese companies of doing. By starting with the initial training data from Western devs, the Chinese AIs (allegedly) skipped over the hard part, which means they are able to focus more of their processing on the end product.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your perspective (ignoring all the ethical questions around AI data acquisition). Duplicating work someone else has already done is wasteful.
But it's also disingenuous to say that the guy who takes an existing dictionary and changes all the definitions did a "better job" than the guy who wrote the first one, even if the end product is, in fact, better.