Comment by lowbloodsugar
5 days ago
Sure. And there’s Lyft and Uber and plenty of others. And Grubhub and DoorDash and uber and how many others. And I don’t even fucking remember how many electric fucking scooter companies, I’m practically falling over scooters! I’m sure they aren’t earning market share by selling at a loss either.
Uber has been profitable since 2023.
And it was founded in 2009, 14 years without turning a profit
Which, by analogy, would mean you could use subsided tokens for over 10 years and then, and only then, actually purchase your own hardware to do inference, with over a decade of technological advancements to compound.
I'll invest in inference hardware whenever the economics make sense, not because of my prediction that prices will get higher (also, because smaller models keep getting better and they might just suffice for most of my use cases in a few years time).
My biggest worries in terms of cost is in regards to training. Whenever that gets too expensive for Beijing to pay, we won't be getting new SOTA open small models to run on local hardware, which, again, reinforces the decision to use providers for AI inference for now.
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