Are labs intentionally keeping LLMs huge to justify compute monopolization?

gnukeith · x · 2026-10-12

An opinion thread speculating that labs keep scaling LLMs deliberately: if big models stayed necessary, massive compute aggregation looks justified and dodges regulatory scrutiny in a market where it drives up prices. gnukeith agrees, questioning why smaller isn't the goal — perhaps big models exist only to distill into smaller ones. He praises the compact architectures of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next.

Related event: Debate rages over whether ever-larger LLMs are progress or a compute moat(2 posts)→

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