Comment by ben_w

7 months ago

> It is also for the beneficiaries because price comes into the equation and the longer it takes, the more expensive it will be.

> We are currently paying the early-Uber prices at the moment but it's likely not sustainable (or not enough) and we'll see price hikes as soon as vendor locking is sufficiently set in.

Not so, there are many open-weights models close to the Pareto frontier* just waiting for cheaper RAM. Low-end models I can already run on my laptop.

We only get lock-in if some vendor manages to create an architecture which is both significantly better and secret. Secret not merely against employees moving around and sharing ideas or anonymously leaking things — the labs are known to use AI as part of the model development, while the models themselves are already observed to attempt to leak their own weights in various circumstances.