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by antonvs 15 days ago
I don’t get this idea that AI will go away at some point. We’ll still have all the self-hostable models even if there are no newly trained models for a while. There will be companies that make money hosting those and selling tokens at a profit. We already have a pretty good idea what that looks like.

We’ll also have companies like Google and Meta where AI is not their main product, who get competitive benefit out of offering AI.

We’ll have companies trying to figure out how to update and train models more cheaply.

People aren’t just going to walk away from it all.

3 comments

Very cheap uber rides went away and so could very cheap subsidized AI.

That said I personally think AI at the level today will get cheaper and probably run locally on boring hardware soon enough. FOSS code doesn't need to FOMO.

Your analogy is perfect, because you can self-host your own “Uber”, by owning, renting, or leasing a car and using it to drive yourself around. Uber may have become more expensive, but cars didn’t go away or see less use.
I also like is Rick Beato’s analogy:

Music studios were expensive, commercially ran enterprises, but were mostly replaced by software that runs at home.

Studios still exist for some situations, but recording itself has been commoditized, since everyone is running the same software.

And oh, now people are doing waaaay more of it.

Cars and renting existed long before Uber.
Do you think that matters?
If Anthropic or OpenAI go bankrupt, is there any reason not to expect that the model weights will be sold to some other company as part of that bankruptcy procedure?
If that happened would the model weights even be worth anything? Clearly the generated tokens weren't good enough to customers to justify their price
You can sell them a lot cheaper if you didn't have to train the model yourself.
Im not sure thats true. Price per task is doubtlessly cheaper with glm 5.2 than opus or fable
See, this is a fascinating point.
It's wishful thinking from people who want it to go away.