There will be frontier models that are non-commoditized, but they'll be kept guarded and hidden away, and you'll only get the final result, so that they can't be distilled and their harness can't be reverse engineered. They'll be billed like employees, rather than like a tool.
If all you have is the starting point and the finishing point, the lack of the path taken from one point to another limits your ability to train models that can efficiently recreate the work, and increases its cost enough that it's possible the US labs can progress capabilities faster than Chinese labs can distill that behavior.
This just looks like a capex problem. There is no evidence that Anthropic has secret sauce above and beyond access to capital. If there is secret sauce, it's unclear that it changes the required amount of capital by all that much.
China will spend all of the money required to catch up, Google and OpenAI will both spend money to catch up as well. NVidia and others will not allow a frontier lab to become the AI bottleneck.
It’s merely descriptive of ingenuity required to distill models back into reasoning models without having any of the chain of thought. You underestimate the original work required because of biases
Isn't that what they are doing already? The model is already guarded and hidden and i only get to send it what i want. Talk with it to clarify my requirements. And i can switch to a different provider for cheaper/better results.