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We'll see I guess. DeepSeek trained a GPT-4 level AI for $6 million (admittedly employing existing LLMs). They have also made huge efficiency gains in inference, charging just $0.14 per million tokens as compared to $3 per million output tokens with a comparable Claude model.
Software is becoming more efficient much more quickly than hardware. We might not need those terawatt scale data centers until after AGI is achieved.
On a theoretical level, absent some sort of woo about quantum computation in the human brain, there's no reason why silicon shouldn’t be vastly superior to synapses eventually.
I'm a huge DeepSeek fan so will clarify.
Those are their own LLMs, and they collectively bump that up to no more than $15M, most likely (we do not yet know the costs of R1 or anything about it, will take a few more weeks; V2.5 is ≈2.2M hours).
0.14/1M input, 0.24/1M output vs $3/$15, to be clear. There are nuances like 0.014 for 1M input in the case of cache hits, opt-in paid caching on Anthropic, and the price hike to come in February.
But crucially, they've published model and paper. This is most likely done because they assume top players already know all these techniques, or are close but work on another set that'll yield the same effect.
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I think the phrase "quantum woo" vastly understates the potential impact of quantum computing on machine learning. The quantum algorithm zoo, for example, lists a number of quantum machine learning algorithms. Several of these get exponential speed up from classical algorithms, but even a quadratic speedup of grover's algorithm would be game changing at the scale frontier models operate on.
I agree that most normie use of quantum in the brain is "woo". And I also agree that it's not been established that the brain relies on any quantum effects. But there is actual legitimate research in these directions and it seems wrong to offhandedly dismiss it.
Viable quantum computing dropping today (or even in the next decade or two) would also break almost all extant (asymmetric) cryptography. Yeah, NIST just recently published specs for post-quantum crypto, but I expect it'll be a decade before those are universally supported. Maybe less if it happens: SSL everywhere happened fairly fast, but became a real priority almost overnight. But if quantum were something any well-founded startup could do, nation-state actors could throw some impressive wrenches into any secure networks for a while.
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