{"id":374119,"date":"2026-08-04T02:48:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T09:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/?p=374119"},"modified":"2026-08-04T02:48:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T09:48:33","slug":"frontier-ai-is-easy-to-use-building-it-is-still-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/frontier-ai-is-easy-to-use-building-it-is-still-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Frontier AI is easy to use: building it is still hard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frontier AI systems are a lot easier to get your hands on now. You can reach them through APIs, low-code tools, and open-weight downloads. Training a frontier model from scratch, though, is still out of reach<\/strong> for almost everyone.<\/p>\n

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The original Transformer<\/a> model cost about $670<\/strong> in 2017. GPT-4 is estimated at $78 million to $100 million, and Gemini Ultra at about $191 million. And that’s before you factor in the other requirements: elite researchers, massive datasets, chips, and repeated retraining. Those numbers go a long way toward explaining why the United States produced 61 notable models in 2023, compared with 21 in the European Union and 15 in China.<\/p>\n\n

So if you want to put AI into a product or a workflow, today’s tools are worth using<\/strong>. But the limits are still there. Open-weight releases don’t change who controls the base model, real tuning takes compute, clean domain data, and specialized expertise, and most startups, hospitals, and mid-sized manufacturers are still integrating what already exists while incumbents keep benefiting from scarcity.<\/p>\n\n

That concentration is getting tighter across<\/strong> the whole stack. Amazon Web Services<\/a> held 30% of the cloud market in Q1 2026, Microsoft Azure<\/a> 20%, and Google Cloud 13%. Nearly half of global 2025 funding went to those players. Qualcomm bought Modular. d-Matrix bought Wallaroo.ai. Research stayed concentrated in the Global North, women and racial minorities were still underrepresented, and underserved regions could end up with weaker systems while a small group keeps deciding what comes next, even if access to models now runs through the cloud, APIs, and downloads.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frontier AI systems are a lot easier to get your hands on now. You can reach them through APIs, low-code tools, and open-weight downloads. Training a frontier model from scratch, though, is still out of reach for almost everyone. The original Transformer model cost about $670 in 2017. GPT-4 is estimated at $78 million to … Continue reading “Frontier AI is easy to use: building it is still hard”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9340,"featured_media":374118,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[6771],"class_list":["post-374119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","content-category-ai"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9340"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":374120,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374119\/revisions\/374120"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374119"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=374119"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=374119"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=374119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}