On stage and off stage, angst about AI seems to be shifting. Last year’s theme at Cannes was how tech platforms might disrupt agencies with AI-generated ads. This year, marketers are now among the many feeling disrupted (and increasingly disoriented) when it comes to how their
MARKET TRENDS
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Exponential growth confirmed by multiple AI benchmarks
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Basically every chart that attempts to benchmark real work shows exponentials. If you don’t like the METR chart the UK’s governmental assessment shows the same thing. So does GDPval. The frontier is jagged, of course, so not in every aspect of AI, but still.
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Miramar execs dismissed AI film creation early on
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Yeah, I have hundreds of stories to tell that people have told me over the years. Like when the execs at Miramar, big Hollywood company, in early days of AI art models, told a guy I know "there's no way people want to create AI films."
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Debate on steady-state vs exponential intelligence value
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It is entirely possible that the steady-state people will prove to be right in the future, but there's no sign of a slowdown yet. And if greater intelligence brings greater value at an exponential pace (which it has, but may not always) then it matters a lot which world we're in.
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Growing division between exponential and steady-state AI beliefs
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A thing I am noticing is the number of folks who believe AI is “real” is larger, but now there is a growing division between people who know that we are on an exponential & those whose mental model is that we are at a sort of steady state. The difference leads to misunderstanding
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Debate on open vs frontier model capability gap and switching difficulty
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That is probably right on where we disagree. I believe the capability delta outside of coding between open & frontier is much larger. I also am suspicious that open models will continue to stay at the frontier. I also think switching between models is harder for many tasks in
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Banning Chinese models will only boost their popularity
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Yes, and they will lose. What, are they going to ban all of China's models? That will just make them more popular:
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Every enterprise will have its own model-harness-sandbox-eval flywheel
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Every enterprise will have its own model-harness-sandbox-eval flywheel with token value per watt optimization. This is the future. Simple reason: tacit knowledge about the domain and customers and their workflows that the company uniquely understands and has built trust around.
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More companies falling behind frontier models, early RSI acceleration
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More companies are falling behind the frontier than keeping up with it (Mistral, Grok, etc.) & we are in the era of early RSI where there is acceleration. I haven’t seen any evidence of sudden frontier models emerging, but interested in seeing what you are hinting at.
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Open source harness advances depend on model intelligence from few firms
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Lots of advances coming from the open source harness movement (including Moltbook, RAG approaches back in the day, etc.) but they depend on the intelligence of the models created by a small handful of companies & the more intelligent those models, the more others can do with them