Comment by ninjahawk1
9 hours ago
At the current rate, open sourced models are expected to surpass cloud models within a couple years based on a study I read a couple days ago.
Looking back at chatGPT and claude a couple years ago, very small Qwen models are basically equal in coding to what those cloud based models could do then. Also factoring in scaling laws, a 9b going to 18b is roughly a 40% increase, whereas 18b to 35b is 20%, I expect there will be a change of at least price in cloud based models.
Adobe used to be $600 per month, then it became $20 when distribution scaled.
That makes no sense, though, and reeks of extrapolating a trend way beyond the conditions in which it is valid.
The simple truth is, cloud models are always going to be strictly superior to open ones, simply because cloud model vendors can run those same open models too. And they still retain economies of scale and efficiency that operating large data centers full of specialized hardware, so at the very least they can always offer open models at price per token that's much less than anyone else's electricity bill for compute. But on top of that, they still have researchers working on models and everything around them; they can afford to put top engineers on keeping their harness always ahead of whatever is currently most popular on Github, etc.
While this might be true I’m worried about the hardware side of things.
What if you have a good enough model but the cloud model providers are better in procuring hardware for interference?
I personally believe that eventually manufacturers will want to sell more of their hardware and look for ways to sell hardware to consumers. isnt that situation quite similar to the days of early computers? I am for sure biased in hoping that will be the case
The cloud providers are probably better at procuring hardware for inference, but on prem users are better at repurposing hardware that they'd need anyway for their existing uses. In a world where AI compute is likely inherently scarce, it makes sense to rely on both.
Local inference is definitely going to make more and more sense. Modern CPUs have all this amazing hardware well-optimized for inference purposes. I use a lot of web tools and see AI baked in and it feels weird. I want the smartness localized for speed and data security. I think and hope the industry points towards smart ai agents operating as locally as possible.
You’ll be able to run the open models on any cloud at the cost of the hardware rental. While the closed models will try to mark up beyond the base cost.
> Adobe used to be $600 per month, then it became $20 when distribution scaled.
What product is this referring to? I haven't heard about Adobe having any offering that is quite that expensive?
If you have a link to the study you read, please share it.
Adobe never costed $600 per month. They had Creative Suites upwards of $3000 but that was before SaaS
What were all the datacenters for???
Those would be the Pork Futures Warehouse from Discworld.