Comment by Gigachad
18 hours ago
How is the math so good for data centres but so bad for home gear? A Mac mini capable of running these models ends up at around 10 years of subscription costs.
18 hours ago
How is the math so good for data centres but so bad for home gear? A Mac mini capable of running these models ends up at around 10 years of subscription costs.
Serving LLM inference is more efficient with more concurrent requests. For a single inference request, the bottleneck is GPU memory bandwidth, as the inference engine spends most of its time waiting to move values in memory. With concurrent requests, it's possible to service multiple requests in a single pass through the model weights, meaning you can utilize more of the GPU/APU's compute.
So you have to price your local hardware against however many subscriptions you would need to run a dozen concurrent agents around the clock.
But even then, I would guess subscriptions are priced on the basis that they don't expect every user to utilize their entire usage limit. I.e. power users are subsidized by casual users.
All of it is really about scale, same reason as a single person you can't sell french fries as cheap as McDonalds.
Couldnt they though? A medium fry at mcdonalds costs about $4 and you can buy 5lbs if potatoes for $4.
I think its more like 40 cents to make at home. So I think its quite unlike McDonalds.
A single person could make french fries for themselves cheaper than McDonalds, but once they have to start including the cost of the building and equipment, charging for their labor, and complying with health codes and worker safety requirements, they will quickly find that the fixed costs swamp the variable costs.
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(numbers are just to illustrate a point, not accurate) Now assume you can't buy a 5lb bag of potatoes and you can only buy 10,000 lb bag. Now also assume that you can't buy this 10,000 lb bag unless you know someone else will pay for fries for the other 9,995 lb because you can't eat that many fries. That's the kind of scale the token inference market is efficient at.
How much does a fryer cost? How much does the fryer cost to run? How much would it cost to get the fries into the customers hand (i.e. food truck, rent)?
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Because the datacenter setups serve multiple users concurrently while your mac mini only serves one. You would also lose money hand over fist renting/buying 4xH200s just to serve deepseek flash to yourself.
These datacenters run the GPU's close to 100% usage 24/7. The Mac mini at home probably has <25% utilization. And then there's economies of scale, wholesale discounts, etc.
The Mac mini GPU also isn't as optimized as the datacenter GPUs
You can batch calls if you're serving a lot of people at once.
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