Buying a phone is a non-dispensable part of life today. There are some government services in many countries which are digital only (and phone only in particular), and restaurants, hotels, etc in the service industry which all require you having a phone, otherwise you can't use their services. And this trend is growing. So if you are the type who wants to live in a cave, or hang yourself on a tree rather than accepting that modern societies require a modern phone, thats's your choice. But others rather accept this. We are beyond the point where this trend can be reversed. On the other hand AI is not that integral part of people's lives yet, and it's better to protest now as long as it has an impact
These are the comments of the people who will cry a f@cking river when all the f@cking bubbles burst. You really think that it's "$300 total to serve the same amount of tokens as a 5090 can produce in 1 year running constantly"??? Maybe you forgot to read the news how much fucking money these companies are burning and losing each year. So these kind of comments as "to run local models is not worth it EVER" make me chuckle. Thanks for that!
If I were predicting the bubble to burst and API prices to go up in the future, wouldn't it be much better to use (abuse) the cheap API pricing now and then buy some discount AI hardware that everyone's dumping on the market once the bubble actually does burst? Why would I buy local AI hardware now when it is at it's most expensive?
How wrong the author is about that! IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering
But local agents will still keep working. Of course they're not as poweful as an acre of industrially cooled compute power, but still a massive improvement over "Intellisense" and code snippets.
You're 100% right though, you shouldn't build your business on top of an AI service and not have a plan what to do _when_ it either goes away or just prices itself out. It's a massive bubble where money is just moving in a circle.
> IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering
It's worse than you state; a primary premise of the current AI expansion and investment, continuously repeated, is that computational resources are increasing for the same price-point.
So tell me, when we have these hardware gains in 5 years, why the fuck would I pay for fractionally better output on a cloud subscription when I could run on-prem GPUs for a fraction of what the actual subscription would be, giving me 24x7 agents working with no limit?
Current highly-invested AI providers are token providers - they are sitting at the bottom of the value-chain. They are trying to climb the value-chain, but the real value is in the models, and since all models have mostly converged on the same performance, running your own gives a very tiny drop in value.
Their problem is that, even at $200/m, it is not feasible to offer 24x7 access to the models - that max subscription has tiny limits: on that subscription you most definitely are not enabling even a single agent to run f/time.
You might get 3 hours per day, maybe. Best case, you get half a working day (4 hours), for five days. So double the subscription, and you're still looking at only a single simply agent that you can run f/time for $400/m.
For collaborating agents, you'll have, what, 4 - 5 diving into a large task in parallel? That's maybe $1600/m - $2000/m to solve tasks. You still have to pay the (increasingly incompetent) human operator to manage them.
That sort of workflow is what is being sold as the vision, and yet that will only be economically viable if you're self-hosting your own model.
The way things are going personal computing will be a thing of the past. It started with GPUs being too expensive but now it’s RAM and eventually SSDs.
We’ll need AI not because it is actually better but because future generations won’t have personal computing hardware to start learning when they are 7.
I'm beginning to pick up a few more consulting opportunities based on my writing and my revenue from GitHub sponsors is healthy, but I'm not particularly financially invested in the success of AI as a product category.
Thanks for the link. I see that you get credits and access to embargod releases. So I understand that's not financial stake, but seems enough of an incentive to say positive things about those services, doesn't it? Not that it matters to me, and I might be wrong, but to an outsider it might seem so
The counter-incentive here is that my reputation and credibility is more valuable to me than early access to models.
This very post is an example of me taking a risk of annoying a company that I cover. I'm exposing the existence of the ChatGPT skills mechanism here (which I found out about from a tip on Twitter - it's not something I got given early access to via an NDA).
It's very possible OpenAI didn't want that story out there yet and aren't happy that it's sat at the top of Hacker News right now.
I love to write code too. But what usually happens is that I go through running the gauntlet of proving how brilliant code I can write in a job interview, and then later conversely being paid for listening to really dumb conversations of our stakeholders and sitting in project planning, etc meetings just so that finally everybody can harass me to implement something that a million programmer implemented before me a million times, at which point the only metric that matters to either my fellow developers or my managers or the stakeholders is the speed of churning the code out, quality or design be damned. So for this reason in most cases in my work I use LLMs.
How any of that comes down to an investment portfolio manager as writing "world class code" by LLMs is a mistery to me.
Its not anything was wrong with it. It was more an excersize in adding utilities and features to see how far and fast it can go with a few prompts. And what if you want historical speed tests for the year? Need to store that data some where. If anything its futile in either regard, but one just feels more fun.
Yeah, shallow dismissal of people's effort to try to make a change must be because they are a ‘one trick pony’. Is that all you brought to the conversation?
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