[dangus]

I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS?

“AI in a box” sounds a heck of a lot like “the box” from the Silicon Valley TV show. Or the Google search appliance. Or name any other on-premise thing that is equally dinosauric.

The real finding of this article is that AI tokens are direct competitors with offshoring. $1,500/month buys you a whole employee in India.

And this is before AI companies inevitably increase pricing after the conclusion of the growth phase.

[pm90]

> I don’t think companies will do that. Why don’t they just buy local on-premise infrastructure even though it’s cheaper than AWS?

For customer facing, production software, its worth paying a cloud tax to get the reliability guarantee. For tools that are used by engineers for code development, there is no need for such bulletproof guarantees.

[dangus]

That makes very little sense. SaaS/cloud tooling is overwhelmingly popular for internal tooling.

Which category of developer tool has on-premise as the more popular option?

Cloud isn’t about “reliability,” it’s about being able to focus on your core business rather than spending all your time maintaining stuff.

[Buttons840]

Local AI servers are different because they don't have to form a single system. If one AI server goes down, just use the other one.

This is unlike customer facing systems where, if your database server goes down, you probably can't just use the other one--the whole system is down.

[dangus]

There are plenty of horizontally scaled systems where the choice is still made to use a cloud provider.

It’s really a lot more about business focus.

I don’t want to hire someone who understands how an email server works if I can pay Microsoft $10/employee/month for an email account.