26th June 2026
This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics:
- Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.
- The ongoing AI infrastructure buildout—the one that is, according to former US AI Czar David Sacks, essential to the US economy, assumes a functionally global total addressable market for US AI services. No one is building $100 billion dollar data centers to serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access. [...]
— Dean W. Ball, 35 thoughts on what has happened and what America should do