The Cost of AI on the Cutting Edge

Different approaches to keeping up. Stop the bleeding.

An hour of AI per day

Oh brother. A new aphoroism, but born of the popular craze of the time, nothing timeless.

It was tweeted that:

An anecdotal survey of GauntletAI grads came to the consensus that staying on the cutting edge of AI takes about one hour per day.

Yes, per day.

Maybe it's true, whatever it means. But it's certainly not desirable.

Off-frontier

I was surprised to hear some corporate temperance toward AI the other day, by one of the tecnological titans that is otherwise promoting it -- Microsoft. Their CEO of AI, Mustafa Suleyman, describes their strategy as one of purposefully avoiding the cutting edge.

Aside: Since when do we have multiple CEOs? Title inflation reachs the top. Next, Principal CEO. M'lord CEO.

He gave an interview on CNBC:

Waiting to build models that are "three or six months behind" offers several advantages, including lower costs and the ability to concentrate on specific use cases, Suleyman said.

It's "cheaper to give a specific answer once you’ve waited for the first three or six months for the frontier to go first. We call that off-frontier," he said. "That's actually our strategy, is to really play a very tight second, given the capital-intensiveness of these models."

Tight second. Following, not ignoring. But not bleeding cash and time on the cutting edge. Somewhat incredible that a top tech leader would say this out loud in the current environment of frenzy and AI virtue-signaling.

Remember Deepseek, built for a fraction of the cost, on top of previous models' work.

AI churn

Everything is moving so fast, things are going to change, and we're going to throw away plenty of investment as we go. The half life of AI knowledge is probably a week.

Staying with any cutting edge is a challenge. The faster, more volatile and dynamic, the harder to keep up. The extra effort to stay on the cutting edge of AI at this moment is throw-away effort.

Churn. Lots of heat. Lots of noise.

Let's turn that volume down to a whisper. Don't worry. We'll catch any really big news and momentarily turn it back up. In the meantime, we'll avoid the maelstrom and keep focus on what matters to us personally.