Kurtz was relaying what a CIO at a big New York bank told him over dinner. He said the bank plans to send only high-value "Formula One" work to frontier models and to post-train open-weight models for everything else, and that he sees the same shift customer after customer.
…have local models that are all running on people's computers. You may have a mixture of local models plus sort of last mile routing into frontiers in terms of what they look like. You're going to have a lot more open weight models. You can just see the shift in the tokens over the last six months.
What is a shift that you're seeing? And what's the order of magnitude there? How long do you think that continues for?
I talk to CIOs almost every day. I got dinner with one tonight from Big Bank in New York. And basically, the comment is: we got into AI. We went all in great. The costs were out of control. Token maxing stopped when people got big bills. And I said, well, how do you think about this? Like, what are you going to do? And they said, the models are so, the open weight models right now are so good, even if they're three months behind, it's plenty for what we need. And one of the customers' comments, and they know I'm into Formula One, they said any Formula One activity that we need for the bank will go to the frontier. Like if it's alpha and we're making money and it's like, you know, super important, we'll pay the money, no big deal. But for all the other things, like it's really expensive and we're going to create all of our own open weight models, you…
so I guess on the open weight model, one of the statements that tends to be made is that they are at least in part distilled from the labs. In other words, you have Chinese open source players who are effectively training their models against that Anthropic or OpenAI model or other sort of frontier…
I mean, I guess my first comment is what were the frontier models distilling when they got all that information? I mean, we know all of the sort of lawsuits around where the data came from and how that unfolded, right? So we kind of start from that. So it's
like a fine liquor. It's triple distilled. It's triple
