This only confirms why a person living in Africa or other developing parts of the world, who has internet access and some seed money, is really limited in how they can earn money online.
I also don't agree that the agents simply "lost" $3,200. In reality, they used most of those funds paying for their own limited thinking capabilities (API/compute costs).
It's was always a case to describe your idea in context already known to users. Examples Uber for X, or eBay for Y.
I think it's a great way to learn to build alternatives for payed services. Look at cal.com
I would disagree, but before let me acknowledge how well written article is and bread analogy is spot on.
However, author complete discounted open source and ability to spin up open source software that will replicate almost 1:1 what SaaS offers without a pay-to-access requirement.
Why spend thousands on integration with SaaS that you can take open source, vibe code missing features and start using? You say maintenance, but I'd argue that owning your data is more important that costs of maintenance.
Like bread, when you learn and have ability to choose healthier product you never go back to store brought.
No. You should know that most software are developed for business. Free or too cheap is not good for business use. When I earn money or save money by a software, i can pay it to get full support.
This has been true for years already though - why would anyone use confluent over just running Kafka themselves, or self host sentry, elasticsearch, gitlab, mongo, databricks or grafana?
If you were running a startup that had at least 1 paid developer, the cost of outsourcing these services were a rounding error compared to the actual salaries. If you wanted to skimp on these other things, you'd be saving maybe 2% of your budget.
Now, these supporting services can quickly become more expensive than the cost of a subscription to a powerful coding agent. You can get a beefy server on Hetzner for less than $50/month, self-host all of that and run entirely on open source alternatives. This is on the same order of magnitude as the cost of your LLM subscription. You can (theoretically) have your whole IT operations costing you a few hundred bucks per month.
1. Because there were no "free" support, unlike now GPTs can solve most problems without hiring expensive staff.
2. Companies payed millions on trainings specific to their solutions.
Poland have its one LLM called Bielik. It's not only better in preserving Polish sounding wording, it's also better in writing government documents. Why better? They did arena and statistically it's just better.
The problem with this idea is that someone can, and likely will, come up with the next best architecture that leapfrogs the current frontier models at least once a year, likely faster, for the foreseeable future. This means by the time you've manufactured your LLM on an ASIC, it's 4-5 generations behind, and probably much less efficient than current SOTA model at scale.
It won't make sense for ASIC LLMs to manifest until things start to plateau, otherwise it'll be cheaper to get smarter tokens on the cloud for almost all use cases.
That said, a 10 trillion parameter model on a bespoke compute platform overcomes a lot of efficiency and FOOM aspects of the market fit, so the angle is "when will models that can be run on an asic be good enough that people will still want them for various things even if the frontier models are 10x smarter and more efficient"
I think we're probably a decade of iteration on LLMs out, at least, and the entire market could pivot if the right breakthrough happens - some GPT-2 moment demonstrating some novel architecture that convinces the industry to make the move could happen any time now.
I don't think so. GB200 prices are GOING UP. A100s are still expensive. This implies massive utilization and demand, no? These machines are not sitting idle, or prices would drop in the very competitive hyperscaler environment.
Hard to say at this point. I'm sure you can run your LLM chips 24/7 for training and for the public to make weird thirst-trap videos about Judy Hopps but how real is the utilization and demand, really? Maybe very real, maybe not, I don't think we can know yet.
Its like being back in 1850 and you build the world's first amusement park where the rides are free or very cheap. People are like Amusement parks are the next big thing since Steam Boats! And tons of other rich people start to build huge amusement parks everywhere. The people who are skilled at making amusement park rides will increase their prices, and since the first amusement parks are free so they can get the public going to them demand will be huge.
But how sustainable is that? - well obviously we know from history that amusement parks did, in fact, take over the world and most people spent virtually all their time and money at amusement parks - I think the Crimean War was even fought over some religious-based theme park in Israel - until moving pictures came out, so it worked out for them, but for AI?
Lead is still an order of magnitude better than the alternatives for a lot of things. ex:
- Lead is ductile, malleable, and blocks radiation very effectively making it far easier than other materials as a radiation barrier.
- Lead is one of the few materials that has no resonant frequencies making it an extremely effective acoustic and vibratory dampener.
- Lead and lead compounds are far cheaper, less toxic, and more sustainable catalysts for chemical reactions. So while lead is problematic, for industrial processes it's often fairly harmless and mundane in comparison.
It's because lead has one of the lowest modulus of elasticity of the elements but also has a very high density. So at room temperature it doesn't have any resonant frequencies and has so much mass that it can effectively damp frequencies traveling through it. And you can see this with the lead bell experiment.
The only metals with a lower E are far more expensive or are extremely difficult to work with because they like to catch fire or explode when exposed to water or oxygen or react with any other element they touch. Or they are radioactive.
The "non problematic" elements better than lead are indium, thallium, and selenium. Selenium has toxicity issues (albeit less than lead) and indium and thallium both have low melting points and become increasingly soft/lose their form even at low industrial temperatures. And of course all three are far far more rare than lead and often are produced as byproducts of mining for lead and occasionally other metals.
And there are non-metal options that don't resonate near room temperature like many of the plastics and rubbers but they lack the density/mass to effectively damp vibrations from neighboring components.
I also don't agree that the agents simply "lost" $3,200. In reality, they used most of those funds paying for their own limited thinking capabilities (API/compute costs).
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