Comment by xoa

>On hardware, it's very expensive to purchase anything which can provide a fraction of the performance of a subscription.

One of the basic questions/concerns here though is that it's not like the AI places are getting the GPUs for 10x less. It's true they have some economies of scale, but they also have some waste, and frankly in this particular case it's not clear they get that much gain over what a lot of businesses could achieve. The biggest traditional gain for central providers is that a lot of typical computing usage is burst-y, and in turn local kit might be underutilized. But with LLMs heavy users tend to use them all the time assuming their tokens allow it (and in the case of local hardware there's nothing stopping you, quite the contrary), they can use it directly interactively or leave them to go overnight on something too.

So it's reasonable to suspect that the reason subscriptions are only a fraction of the cost is that we're in a bubble seeing these companies losing money in an attempt to gain some sort of durable advantage. Just as every previous time, there is the chance that the music stops at some point, and they need to crank up pricing or pull other schemes to actually make money. Of course, it can be a good deal in the mean time, you basically get to suck down investor money for nothing, but it's also not unreasonable to at least be consider fallbacks. Even beyond questions of control and risk etc. I know at least a few places that are now genuinely considering questions like "what happens if a datacenter we depend on gets droned" that would have never had an iota of thought devoted to them even 5 years ago.

>On electricity, this is a surprising cost center depending on location. A system with just one 5090 can easily pull 1kW, and to achieve usable performance for a workplace is going to require dozens of machines. This can represent an extra $10-20k in electricity in cheap places.

I don't think that's "surprising" at all, everyone knows about power use. And this seems like it gets heavily into what you're defining as "usable" and is also more useful to define in terms of cost-per-employee vs total. Obviously a bigger business will have a higher line number total even if the cost per employee is identical, but simultaneously can be expected to be making more revenue to pay for it.

If we're defining an average of a dedicated 5090 pulling 1 kW for every single employee (presumably some people wouldn't use it all the time, but others would then pull the compute for other work), running 24/7 (to cover people running stuff when they're away), then that'd be 8760 kWh per year. At my not particularly cheap New England location that'd be about $1900 per employee per year at the generalized residential rate (~$0.22/kWh), or $156 per month. That doesn't seem radical if it really does boost productivity. However, there is a lot of room to go lower. I'd expect a business to run backup anyway, and these days there are a lot of incentives to do that at least partially with batteries. That also opens up rate shifting as another way to pay back the cost. If we change to time of day pricing, that's 8 hours of peak pricing with the rest off-peak. 8 kWh of battery can now be had for a few thousand. And the off-peak rate is only ~$0.14/kWh, cutting the cost per year by about $700 to $1200 per employee per year. Solar power is also usually far more valuable to use yourself then sell back to the grid, and also continues to plummet in price.

None of this is to say that it makes sense for every place at all, but it's close enough to the the line that the math is at least worth exploring, or could at least lower the cost enough to be worth it given other things. It really comes down to how much extra value the company (or individual) expects to come out of it per month.

>In California or Europe this could be $30-60k per year.

Dunno about Europe, but at the kinda prices I see for California I'm really surprised more places aren't trying to move a lot of usage to battery+renewable.

>The only real moat that local LLMs have right now is privacy.

I don't think resiliency and control are things that can be taken for granted anymore, particularly on the global scale. War and terrorism is getting worse again. International relations are getting nastier, and governments have the power to just order places cut off. If LLMs aren't particularly valuable to a business, then why an expensive subscription? But if they are particularly valuable, then insurance is something leadership should be contemplating.