[nemothekid]

If we knew how to build humans for cheap, then it wouldn't require spending a billion dollars. Your reasoning is circular.

It's precisely because we don't know how to build these LLMs cheaply that one must so spend so much money to build them.

[chongli]

The point is that it's not inherently necessary to spend a billion dollars. We just haven't figured it out yet, and it's not due to trade secrets.

Transistors used to cost a billion times more than they do now [1]. Do you have any reason to suspect AIs to be different?

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/how-much-did-early-transistors-cos...

[jryle70]

> Transistors used to cost a billion times more than they do now

However you would still need billions of dollars if you want state of the art chips today, say 3nm.

Similarly, LLM may at some point not require a billion dollars, you may be able to get one, on par or surpass GPT4, easily for cheap. The state of the art AI will still require substantial investment.