Comment by AyyEye
19 hours ago
You should probably disclose that you're a CTO at an AI startup, I had to click your bio to see that.
> The amount of compute in the world is doubling over 2 years because of the ongoing investment in AI (!!)
All going into the hands of a small group of people that will soon need to pay the piper.
That said, VC backed tech companies almost universally pull the rug once the money stops coming in. And historically those didn't have the trillions of dollars in future obligations that the current compute hardware oligopoly has. I can't see any universe where they don't start charging more, especially now that they've begun to make computers unaffordable for normal people.
And even past the bottom dollar cost, AI provides so many fun, new, unique ways for them to rug pull users. Maybe they start forcing users to smaller/quantized models. Maybe they start giving even the paying users ads. Maybe they start inserting propaganda/ads directly into the training data to make it more subtle. Maybe they just switch out models randomly or based on instantaneous hardware demand, giving users something even more unstable than LLMs already are. Maybe they'll charge based on semantic context (I see you're asking for help with your 2015 Ford Focus. Please subscribe to our 'Mechanic+' plan for $5/month or $25 for 24 hours). Maybe they charge more for API access. Maybe they'll charge to not train on your interactions.
I'll pass, thanks.
I'm not longer CTO at an AI startup. Updated, but don't actually see how that is relevant.
> All going into the hands of a small group of people that will soon need to pay the piper.
It's not very small! On the inference side there are many competitive providers as well as the option of hiring GPU servers yourself.
> And historically those didn't have the trillions of dollars in future obligations that the current compute hardware oligopoly has. I can't see any universe where they don't start charging more, especially now that they've begun to make computers unaffordable for normal people.
I can't say how strongly I disagree with this - it's just not how competition works, or how the current market is structured.
Take gpt-oss-120B as an example. It's not frontier level quality but it's not far off and certainly gives a strong redline that open source models will never get less intelligent than.
There is a competitive market in hosting providers, and you can see the pricing here: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gpt-oss-120b/providers?...
In what world is there a way in which all the providers (who are want revenue!) raise prices above the premium price Cerebas is charging for their very high speed inference?
There's already Google, profitable serving at the low-end at around half the price of Cerebas (but then you have to deal with Google billing!)
The fact that Azure/Amazon are all pricing exactly the same as 8(!) other providers as well as the same price https://www.voltagepark.com/blog/how-to-deploy-gpt-oss-on-a-... gives for running your own server shows how the economics work on NVidia hardware. There's no subsidy going on there.
This is on hardware that is already deployed. That isn't suddenly going to get more expensive unless demand increases... in which case the new hardware coming online over the next 24 months is a good investment, not a bad one!