The model is the product

The Model is the Product There were a lot of speculation over the past years about what the next cycle of AI development could be. Agents? Reasoners? Actual multimodality? I think it's time to call it: the model is the product. All current factors in research and market development push in this direction. Generalist scaling is stalling. This was the whole message behind the release of GPT-4.5: capacities are growing linearly while compute costs are on a geometric curve. Even with all the efficiency gains in training and infrastructure of the past two years, OpenAI can't deploy this giant model with a remotely affordable pricing. Opinionated training is working much better than expected. The combination of reinforcement learning and reasoning means that models are suddenly learning tasks. It's not machine learning, it's not base model either, it's a secret third thing. It's even tiny models getting suddenly scary good at math. It's coding model no longer just generating code but ma ... Read full article.