Thread

1. amelius · 1789928450 · focus · HN ↗

   Will that be enough for AI's hunger?

   1. GoToRO · 1789929801 · focus · HN ↗

      It will be just in time for when AI will run very well on consumer hardware and the need for data centers will collapse.

      1. IshKebab · 1789930756 · focus · HN ↗

         That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead.

         1. bunderbunder · 1789932090 · focus · HN ↗

            I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, and seeing model performance improvement in addition to large inference cost reductions. Being able to run them locally hasn’t exactly been a disaster for devex, either.

            It may turn out that demand for SOTA frontier models isn’t so limitless after all.

            1. pixl97 · 1789933244 · focus · HN ↗

               Every product follows demand curves. At a price of 0 you could find infinite usage. This has nearly zero relation to how much it costs to provide the product.

               1. bunderbunder · 1789934740 · focus · HN ↗

                  Except of course it relates. All else being equal, we will prefer $X COGS over $2X COGS because that helps us with both profit margins and price competition.

                  1. pixl97 · 1789935323 · focus · HN ↗

                     It relates in the sense there's a minimum cost of production without losses, not the actual price people are willing to pay.

                     1. bunderbunder · 1789937974 · focus · HN ↗

                        Framing it in terms of the price people might be willing to pay for a single product in isolation frames the point I was making, which was about price competition, right out of the picture.

                        Maybe I'd be willing to pay $10 for product A if I had other options. But if there's a product B for $3 that's not quite as nice but still ticks all my boxes, then product instantly becomes a lot less attractive.

               2. trombuance · 1789945361 · focus · HN ↗

                  >At a price of 0 you could find infinite usage

                  Infinite demand isn't a thing. Even if they'd offer free compute forever (not likely possible) I and many others would still use local models that we have full control over and that do not harvest our personal data.

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