Frontier Labs

“They, I, for sure, I don't think they will generate free cash flow anytime soon. I think they're gonna generate a lot of operating cash flow, and then they'll use that to buy a lot of, you know, GPUs XPUs, whatever, whatever I'm gonna call them.”

“I think a lot of the hyperscalers in Frontier Labs are going to be very relevant providers in the chip ecosystem.”

“I think calling open source models Chinese models is a psyop by the frontier labs to basically trick people into thinking that they're scary and otherize them.”

“They used to spend much, that much on data, now they spend a lot more on RL environments, and these environments absolutely capture that relationship of recursive self-improvement on a verifiable task.”

“And if we ever got into advertising with some of the chatbots or large language models, you'd say, would one of these frontier labs become an operating system? It doesn't look like they're going that way. So like, even there, you're going to have fragmentation…”

“For the vast majority of use cases, I think token consumption is going up for the open source guys while share of economics is going up for the frontier labs.”

“I don't think it comes from a place of trying to compete. I think a lot of times the stories around how these products got built is that people inside were amazed by what it was able to do. They built a prototype, and the prototype just happened to be somethin…”

“What's shocking about those business models is they're growing almost as fast as the frontier labs in the early days. But burning very little cash.”

“It's not only true that they're terrified of working with the frontier labs, but they're also terrified of working with the Chinese open source.”

“Companies are spending on it, usually within Frontier Labs, at about 10 to 20% about the amount that they're spending on GPUs.”

“The one thing I think that makes this business a bit of a moving target is that the models do learn pretty rapidly. Like if you are offering a certain type of this thing a certain kind of a collaboration to labs with a certain, let's say, type of talent and a …”

“There is also, I think, limits to how much value can be added there because ultimately there is just not too much new information. If you're telling the model itself to kind of generate, yeah, There is a, I mean, there's all sorts of things about how beyond th…”

“He said he has got a customer who just moved like nine figures off of the frontier labs to put it on GLM five, two.”

“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels and trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone, and also does …”

“If Android represents all open source models, open weights, et cetera, iOS represents frontier labs. I feel like we're going to head down a path with a similar breakdown in the U S and globally. We're like three quarters of the world are going to choose open s…”

“I don't feel like we've suffered or like other companies are vacuuming up all the good people because so many of them I do think sit at Netflix.”

“Our clients are just, to say they're unhappy with the frontier labs is to say I'm welcome at the Berkeley faculty. It's like, there's just a level of discomfort and loss of trust.”

“So like, what does that mean for all of these enormous positions that are out there in these frontier labs? I think it's kind of shaky.”

“I think what is truly novel and unique Is an enterprise's data. It's their data. It is a living record of their enterprise, its decisions, its actions, its operations, and through it, you can get, you can realize enterprise context for that bespoke organizatio…”

“I mean, I think that Meta you know, like, currently the relationship is still paused. Every other one of the Frontier Labs has grown their relationship with us since and the company has been crushing it but they're the only one that is paused, which is public.”

“And many of them are running their own generators in their backyards at half capacity. And I'm going, this makes no sense. Let's all pull our generators so that a shoe factory can spike up during the day, a steel factory can spike up during the night, and then…”

“Our sort of maximalist thinking is that the frontier labs are going to keep innovating in the level of reasoning and capabilities of their models, and so trying to create these customizations or adding our own token weights Is not a good idea and is a waste of…”

“If you create a fork and you're always three to six months behind what your, Competition could be doing. You know, like there'll be other companies, I'm sure, who are thinking about some of the challenges that we are addressing at Asana. I don't want to be thr…”

“What I'm more interested in is, like, this idea of recursive self-improvement and to what extent you can actually have LLMs improving LLMs, because I think all the Frontier Labs, this is, like, The thing for obvious reasons. And they're all trying to recursive…”

“A swarm of agents on the internet could collaborate to improve LLMs and could potentially even, like, run circles around Frontier Labs. Like, who knows, you know? Yeah, like, maybe that's even possible. Like, Frontier Labs have a huge amount of trusted compute…”

“Like, if you're inside one of the frontier labs, like, there are certain things that you can't say and conversely, there are certain things that the organization wants you to say, and, you know, they're not gonna twist your arm, but you feel the pressure of, l…”

“And I think if you're outside of that frontier lab your judgment fundamentally will start to drift because you're not part of the, you know, what's coming down the line.”

“What people want is AIs that just go and do stuff. Like just go, just get it done. I don't want to hear from you until it's done. Like that's what people want. And like, that's what the market and the AI companies, the frontier labs will eventually give us. An…”

“TodayWiz is the security solution for most of the frontier labs.”

“Sometimes, yeah, these benchmarks, they accidentally leak in certain ways, or the frontier labs will tweak the way they evaluate their models on these benchmarks. Like they'll tweak their system prompt. Or they'll tweak the number of times they run their model…”

“We work with seven out of the eight frontier labs.”

“I think it's standard practice among the frontier labs to try to cap your big final pre-training run to two months not more than that.”

“If the scaffolding is what really moves a lot of like from, you know, broad capability model to like something that actually has meaningful impact, that scaffolding is not just like, oh, only the labs of people are trained models can do it. Like the number of …”

“It's used by all Frontier Labs in some capacity.”

“It's very lopsided, right? Because like, is there only like a very small numbers of frontier labs, right? And they want a lot of data. And there's like a massive amount of like startups or companies providing data. So like, you can see these companies, like th…”

“I think like, I think this is the pattern for every frontier lab now.”

“And with the Claude codes and the codec CLIs and the deep researchers, researchers, you starting to see some evidence that the products are going to be a much more central part of how these frontier labs operate.”

“I'm pretty bearish on like Hey, this is a model that is trained as an LMS judge, but it's a generic LMS judge that can be used to judge anything. I just don't think you're going to beat the frontier labs on that.”

“I think if you look from a business model perspective on this, I think at least right now, we are not planning to build our own models. I think ultimately that's a way out. You know, if you also are building your own models, we're not doing that. We are really…”

“I think you, what you see in all the frontier labs is that they have data teams. And if you talk to the folks that work on those data teams, what you'll kind of systematically hear is that typically they're under resourced relative to the gains that they're de…”

“Fast forward to today, we're working with Seven of the frontier labs, basically every lab that's doing work and building the best large language models.”

“And if you look at the revenue of just two of the top tier frontier labs You know, if you look at the chart on the left, not only have they surpassed the early revenue ramps of some of the best SaaS companies in history I'll point you over to the right they're…”

“Every time I check in with people at frontier labs, they're like, yeah, we still use human preference data.”

“So internally we do a lot of work actually today with working with all the frontier labs to help them understand their models. So again, we're constantly evaluating them. We're constantly surfacing loss areas for them to improve on and so on and so on.”

“Like, I think it is really interesting in that a lot of the, like for obvious reasons, a lot of the frontier labs, they're just not publishing anymore.”

“You can't operate at a hundred X less capital than a frontier lab, but you can operate at, say, 10 X, like an order of magnitude less capital when you're really focused.”

“This is I think the least spoken about part of what frontier labs do, but Possibly the most important, which is figuring out how they evaluate, like what makes Claude magically feel better at code than you know, another model out there. They did something righ…”

“Our thought was that this was the time where you can actually start a you know, a generational frontier lab that does not need to be coupled to a, you know, to a big cloud provider because if you do it right, you'll actually be able to generate you know, suffi…”

“I don't think it's guaranteed that a big lab can, you know, buy their way to the end user because the fundamental problems of your, you know, research team being far away from your product team will still be true. And the company having, you know, a hundred di…”

“If you look at the most sophisticated labs and what they're really investing in, it's a super high caliber expert data that is like far beyond the model frontier of capabilities.”

“And so I think the investments we're seeing in 20, 25 Frankly, I don't even think it's going to get us to the point where we have compute surplus. I think we're going to end this year compute constrained, and I think a lot of the frontier labs feel the same.”

“As far as a specific prediction for 25 because I don't know when that will happen, I think you will see the frontier labs stop releasing their leading-edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen.”

“The labs that are not that frontier will keep measuring themselves on last year's benchmarks. And then the labs that are actually frontier will tell you about benchmarks you've never heard of.”