Peter Diamandis asks when the labs will stop releasing their best models and keep them for internal use. Wissner-Gross says that point has already passed: in his view the most lucrative use of a frontier model inside a lab is building a stronger one, and every other application is secondary.
But I mean, it's just going to go up, right? And the thing is, it hasn't even touched the defense budget. If you look at the cost of an aircraft carrier on F-35, it's basically like training frontier models, right? And it's going to be more and more kind of leading that way. And again, I think Clayton as director of intelligence, you know, it kind of makes sense because I actually think America is not going to go down the dark path here if they can avoid it, which is like you will have AI lie detectors that are almost perfect very soon. You know, you will be able to have AIs inside all the machines. Like it'll make five eyes look like absolutely nothing. I think that there will be a bit of a push for liberty by the government, but future governments, who knows, right? And again, in other countries, the stuff we saw from the spy espionage intelligence, even spying on their own people, is just going to go crazy. And again, the UK, I think, is a bit dangerous here in some ways, or we're susceptible to that, given our monitoring of social media and other things. Like there is a dark path there, shall we say, for individual liberty and something we should be aware of.
For sure. Our next story is one that really shows how fast the AI frontier is being built. At the Fellows Forum at the end of September, OpenAI's head of applied research, Boris Power, said that 80 to 90% of the company's research is now being aimed at training GPT-7 and GPT-8, because in his words, quote, that's where the most value will be. And incremental updates within a generation like 5.1 and 5.2 are short-term bets and are seen as extremely short-sighted. So the researchers are working two generations ahead of what we have. So, Alex, I'm just curious. You know, we've talked about this, that the top models are being built and being held back. At what point do we see these next models not being released and being used for vertical applications within these labs?
We're already past that point. We're already past the point probably past several months ago, if not earlier, where the highest revenue or at least future discounted revenue per token application of current frontier models in the frontier labs is to develop via recursive self-improvement even stronger models. We're past the event horizon at this point for that. Yeah, this is, again, call it a singularity for a reason. We're past the event horizon. And then all of these other applications that one could imagine the frontier labs throwing tokens at, like, say, curing the top 5,000 diseases, these are all, I think, in a world where the development of stronger models via RSI is so lucrative, at least on a future discounted cash flow basis, they're all just marketing. Like if you're Anthropic or if you're the OpenAI Foundation, you'll throw some of your token budget at safety, sure, maybe 10 to 20% at AI alignment efforts. And then you'll throw a few percent at curing all disease as a marketing effort to ensure that you continue to have social permission to focus on recursive self-improvement. And that's where all the value is.
This is why the San Francisco arrogance is so, so high, but for good reason. Well, you're there right now, Peter. You can probably feel it in the streets. But what's happened is, suppose you're Stefan Bonsal, the CEO of Moderna, and you haven't got an AI model, an AI team yet. And you're thinking in the back of your mind, well, look, we'll just license from Anthropic for a few years, and then we'll figure it out. Anthropic already opened their wet labs. So they're working on two generations of models ahead. They're never going to release those to you. They're going to use those to develop drugs and then they're going to sell drugs. That's what's actually going to happen. And these corporate CEOs are just starting to wake up to the fact that five years of compute has been reserved. The earliest you could get back on the map is five years in the future. Unless you get aggressive in the next six months, I mean, they really need to pull out every stop and panic within the next couple of weeks to have any chance of getting back on the map.
Dave, you're raising a great point. The problem is there are two levels before that even consideration, right? The problem right now is what happens with people is they'll take CEOs, and we talk to them all the time, is they'll take the existing models and go, okay, how do I metabolize that into my company?
Not even seeing that the new models that are 10x better are coming along in three months. And that changes the game completely again. Then you need to worry about compute after that. So I think your comment is exactly right, but they're like two generations away from that. There's an enormous employee chatbot. Two