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Comment by ericmay

20 hours ago

> ? Claude, ChatGPT, etc are heinously expensive for tiny benefits lmao. Local + efficient is clearly the future

Corporate America is where the money is, and corporate America will dictate what products are successful by virtue of spend. Individuals aren't going to be paying $100s or $1000s/month en masse for these models but businesses will be. Being local and efficient isn't that important at this stage but even so as American companies continue to scale and invest they'll be able to make those models more local and efficient if the market wants it. Sort of like how you had a big, giant desktop computer and now you've got a super computer in your phone which is in your pocket. Going straight to "local and efficient" means going straight to being behind because at some point, perhaps now even, the local and efficient model won't be able to keep up.

For some reason people think that they somehow know something that Google or Nvidia or whoever, with hundreds of billions of dollars of real money at stake don't already know and it's both amusing and bizarre to see this play out again and again in off-hand comments like "lol tiny benefits".

You buy an iPhone even though the cheap-o Wal-Mart Android phone for $100 "does the same thing". Except that in this case the Android phone just puts you out of business while those spending big money for "tiny benefits" beat you in the market.

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ericmay

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throwaway27448  17 hours ago

Corporate america is the past. Momentum is carrying capital out of the country. Pay attention to rate of change.

  • ericmay  17 hours ago

    What source are you using for your claim that capital is flowing out of the country? I'm curious to read more about it.

    • throwaway27448  16 hours ago

      I don't think that's a particularly bold claim after thirty straight years of moving supply chains overseas. Capital is, inherently, the means of production. The world where we could compete is gone.

      3 replies →

ForHackernews  19 hours ago

> You buy an iPhone even though the cheap-o Wal-Mart Android phone for $100 "does the same thing".

People buy iPhones because of status signalling and network effects, neither of which appears to apply to AI model choice. LLMs are already rapidly on the way to being interchangeable commodities.

  • ericmay  18 hours ago

    No they don't, it's not 2008. Anybody off the street can get an iPhone or a free iPhone with a mobile plan. They're commodity products. Even homeless people have them.

    To the extent LLMs are commodity products you're right (so far), but that is limited to the main model providers, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, &c. with interoperability on cloud platform providers and other technology providers like an Apple offering you a choice of LLM with Siri or something.

    If you want to suggest that some other model is in the same bucket as those primary 3, it goes back to the crappy, cheap phone analogy which is accurate. Yea you can make calls with it, but you make calls better with an iPhone.