Ep. 507: Who Will Fund A $1 Trillion LLM?

Watch the video version of this episode here: https://youtu.be/dc68lkZ1Bxo?feature=shared At some point cost and payback period will factor into frontier LLM building, especially as use cases are not well defined. We are at the $1 billion LLM level today. $10 billion will likely be the cost of developing frontier LLMs by 2026, $100 billion by 2027 and $1 Trillion by 2028 should the current pace of development continue. In episode 507 we make the case for smaller, “baseline” language models that are industry domain-specific, trained with opensource data as well as with proprietary enterprise data. These baseline models could power various applications and services and also be used to train third-party models. This scenario would create a natural selection/survivorship process for language models whereby smaller models power well-defined use cases that address specific commercial needs. This path makes more economic sense than developing ever larger monolithic LLMs in a vacuum.