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Comment by tngranados

5 days ago

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.

  • > 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.

    Valid takeaway.

    "Invest" in the companies that release their models, because the alternative is to reward the people who will capture the market and jack up the prices to unreasonable level.

    Unfortunately I think this is a bit like game theory, people will choose the local optimum despite the long term problems with doing so.