[lokar]

Of course a model does not really depreciate, the problem is they are forced by competitive pressure to offer newer/better models at the same price.

This is what the elites of the gilded age called "ruinous competition", and the solution today will be the same as back then: monopoly power. This has been the business plan of the tech VC industry for 25+ years.

[lovich]

Do they not depreciate?

The models don't learn without training, and they have finite context windows. As software updates around the world, don't they have to be trained on the new information to stay up to date?

[lokar]

Fair, but in this context people are generally contemplating the need to replace the model with a new, much larger and more expensive model, not just refresh the training set.

It's partly about updating what it "knows", but more about keeping up with competitive pressure on capabilities.

[lovich]

I’m actually not familiar enough to know. Can models be refreshed for cheaper? I thought due to the black box nature of them that there would be no difference between updating and generating a whole new model.

Maybe they can get to a “good enough” level where the next model isn’t 10x the price but if the business model requires ever increasing sizes to paper over the r&d costs from the previous set then I don’t understand how they would transition to profitability

[freejazz]

People? There's a guy upthread quoting the Anthropic CEO on how they view the value of increasing training against the offset of the entirety of the $35T worldwide labor market... It's not "people". It's the salesmen.