The Palo Alto Networks CEO described inspecting all endpoint traffic for about $20 a year per device using small, compressed, task-specific models, which would be ruinously expensive to send through a frontier model's tokens. He said frontier models are worth it in rare cases, such as stopping an active breach.
…will they take? Because that's always the question. So I think it is going to be possible. But if it takes 10 years to break one key, most people are going to rest in peace. That's not a practical answer. That's, I think, where the debate is going to lie. But it won't prove out until it's done.
…there's pacing the frontier, there's now effectively very reasonable alternatives that are open weight at a minimum. Your philosophy around the entire spectrum, and just give us a sense of how we should think about models and capabilities over the next couple of years. Nikesh, you want to start?
…from one company. So that's not a practical example of how models use. So what you do is you take a small language model, you compress it, you make it task-specific, you keep training it until it gets to 99.9% accuracy and say, instead of using it using machine learning algorithms, we're going to use generative AI, small language models, and they're going to do that at the end. So my point is, what we're doing is we're trying to figure out what tasks require what level of intelligence and what is the cost of that intelligence for that particular task. And you suddenly discover you don't need a Ferrari for every task. And by the way, the customers don't want to pay for a Ferrari for every task. I'll give you the flip side. Flip side is: let's assume you're undergoing a breach. You're being attacked, you know you're being attacked. At that point in time, every customer in the room says, Don't worry, use whichever model you need to to stop the breach because they know the business impact of that breach in the billions of dollars. At that point in time, I can run agent swarms, I can do…
I completely agree, but I'm going to take a slightly different lens to get to the same exact end conclusions. Let's take economics. So, today, $20 for a million tokens for probably generation minus one, 50 if you want to go to the most extreme. We could take one of the Chinese open weight models…
And the token consumption that's left over, is that because you actually need it, or is that because it's a default behavior and people are too lazy to change?
Okay, so I'm going to talk about developer behavior. And since I was one, I'm making fun of myself in a younger age. Developers are lazy. They're going to use the most expensive, the most expensive answer unless you put a control on it. Because it's easy.