What They Will NEVER Teach You at Stanford Business School
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a week ago @SemiAnalysis_ wrote that Chinese labs are “simply too compute poor to truly reach the frontier.” today one of those “too compute poor” labs, a 300-person startup actually, shipped a model that compares to opus 4.8
the entire western consensus – export controls, the $650B hyperscaler capex race, the “compute moat” investment thesis – is built on one assumption: flops gate capability. if that were true, chip controls would keep chinese labs permanently behind the frontier.
but after reading through moonshot’s stack i no longer think it is. training is efficiency-compressible: MoE routing, INT4-native quantization, better data curation, infra built around scarcity (their Mooncake stack exists because they don’t have gpus!). a small lab with taste can compress the compute needed to make a frontier model, even if it can’t afford to serve one
the frontier is no longer something money can buy
https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/2078549282744041885
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