Comment by sajithdilshan
9 hours ago
On Apple website it says 512GB memory option is available in October. I guess bumping to that one would cost additional 4-6k US$. So an Ultra with 2TB storage would be north of 15k US$.
That’s like 12 years worth of OpenAI Pro subscriptions
Hard to guess, it can go either way. If you will need to be in a syndicate to use non-sterilized models, that mac makes sense. But if there is mandatory registration of personal cyberarms, you risk going to mines once they check you purchases. You could try to play normie and pretend you simply wanted to show off, by keeping your actual work on external disk, but that leaves traces on system. Counting on someone in the Gap renting you gray iron works as long as you can swap credits. Still, this gear is tiny. Put it in your e-car, with uplink, and leave it at uncle's farm. Discreet.
It was a dark rainy night in Neo-Tokyo as Blake puffed on his vapor cartridge and watched the Mac dealers prowl below. Almost 15k Union Credits to get one of them to meet you in an e-cafe with a fully loaded M5, but man, the inference rush from one of those things was something else.
superior zero latency local skooma
I'm sold on "personal cyberarms" as a concept
Do they include footguns from pointer bugs?
I gotta have some of what you had :)
I thought it was a fun bit of cyberpunk fiction. Those who downvoted him seem to have taken it at face value?
I appreciate the reference to RUSH: Red Barchetta in the final line.
512 option isnt worth it imo, you get severe slowdowns when weights are that large. 256 is the sweet spot, you can run large open weight models at decent speeds for full private inference.
a) we don't actually know what the prices will look like yet, b) what about same weights + huge context? or, same weights that you'd run on 128gb/256gb, but multiple models running for different tasks?
I think it's safe to start the conversation as about bad as the jump from 256 to 512 on the M3, which was a little more than double base to 256. If it's surprisingly different at launch then it can be a party, but there is no sense getting your hopes up for that at the moment.
Longer context also slows token prediction proportional to the context size. If it wasn't regularly referenced then there would be no need to keep it in RAM.
Usually the pitch for more memory is "I can run a massive model/context and get my answer in a while instead of next weekend from disk".
> 512 option isnt worth it imo, you get severe slowdowns when weights are that large.
I think most people are getting 512 for running Chrome with a bunch of tabs open. /s
Agreed.
Specially since one can pay half right now to OpenAI and sign a 12 year iron clad contract for uninterrupted service delivery of OpenAI Pro.
I think we all expect the heavy subsidized subscriptions to end or significantly increase in price at some point, but it could be years from now and I'd rather spend a similar figure on an hypotetical Mac Studio M8 Ultra, or whatever more advanced competitor that will have likley appeared by that time.
A more apples-to-apples comparison would be with API cost in OpenRouter at the same tok/s rate for the same models that you can run locally, maybe.
> heavy subsidized subscriptions to end
Is there evidence that's true though? I mean gross margins on subscriptions being negative since the API is seemingly very profitable (if the price is compared with the cost of serving very large open models).
As long as there is pressure from other providers serving cheaper models that are somewhat competitive without having to incur any of the R&D costs raising prices will be tricky.
>A more apples-to-apples comparison
Don't you mean an Apple to NVidea comparison?
I hope that was sarcasm.
"iron clad" :)
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HN always has these completely contrived counterarguments. What is actually going to realistically happen that will prevent use of an LLM provider? Did you think that the OP literally meant the 12 years or maybe it was just to show how expensive using a Mac Mini as an alternative is?
> how expensive using a Mac Mini as an alternative is?
I think it goes without saying. And it is eminently evident over last couple of decades that from compute to storage to meals 3rd part providers have saved billions upon billions of dollars to enterprises and individuals alike by providing these essential services.
Mass revolts of the peasantry burning down data centers and cutting fiber lines.
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Just commenting here because you're discussing hardware: I thought the test results from the SSD published in this article [1] were pretty interesting. Maybe that's old news though.
[1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3238319/mac-studio-m5-max-r...
Yeah, anyone who thinks local AI is going to save them money is likely to be disappointed, at least if they want to run models that are even remotely capable.
Plenty of other reasons to get excited about local AI, but I don't think cost is one of them.
Maybe you are using a local model to go after some Millennium Prize problem and you don't want OpenAI to take your work and use it to win the prize for themselves? $15k might be a bargain.
And, yes, I know a current local model wasn't going to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, but I'm just using it as an example where privacy might be valuable.
I'll try that argument with my wife next time I want to buy a $15k mac.
It's a bold strategy cotton, lets see if it pays off for em.
Agreed, plenty of other reasons to get excited about local AI.
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Despite being on a site called Hacker News, we seem to often overlook the simple aspect of wanting local AI hardware to hack (not necessarily in the cybersecurity sense) with. I got my local AI hardware because it's an enjoyable hobby for me.
Yes it surprises me too…
apparently if you ever point out HN starts for hackernews and thus expect related attitudes you get downvoted by shocked ( what I guess are zoomers and not bots ) that desperately opine the name is a random abberation doesn't mean anything and one should not deviate from our corporate overlods in any manner.
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On a personal level maybe not yet, but for a medium business upwards it may make sense.
Having no debt and owning in the long run always works out better than a lifetime of renting, if you don’t have to, the massive rent letting these days, is very frustrating at some point don’t you have to draw the line?