The general trend of the industry is to move computational resources from the hands of users into data centers, so that they can control what can be done and how much they'll charge for computational services. In the medium term, a lot of what we take for granted nowadays will only be accessible from cloud providers and companies will pay more and more in subscriptions for these services.

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matheusmoreira 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Computer freedom is dying. Everything the word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Truly depressing...

	▲	petermcneeley 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		lisan al gaib

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wincy 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn’t that mostly economics? I definitely prefer using Claude to GPT-OSS120B for a code assistant.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t have $500,000 laying around to buy myself a DGX B200 with a TB of HBM and 2TB of system ram, nor the 14.3kW of power to run the thing.

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m4rtink 19 hours ago | parent [-]

But will you still be able to afford using it once you have to pay the real price ? Once the venture capital dries up and the dumping stops ?

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selectodude 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm pretty sure all of these LLMs operate in the black on inference costs.

If I were to set up a DGX200 in my garage, say the 5 year TCO is a million dollars. Split that among 500 people and we can get it done for maybe $30/mo per user in total operating cost. I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.

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irishcoffee 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I would bet that these LLMs are far more oversubscribed than 500 subs per server.

Seems like on hn a lot of people pay for the subscriptions.

I don't personally know a single person who pays for any type of llm subscription. I am a staff sw engineer, been doing this a long time.

I acknowledge this is an anecdote. I just happen to know a lot of people at a lot of different companies from my network. Nobody pays for any of this. My company has banned llms, even if I wanted to use one, I can't.

I actually even gave one a shot tonight. I asked for a list of repos I needed to clone to build a yocto image for an nxp board. This was the result:

mkdir -p sources && cd sources

git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky

git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.yoctoproject.org/meta-freescale

git clone -b $BRANCH github.com

git clone -b $BRANCH git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded

git clone -b $BRANCH github.com

I then pointed out that three of those lines were useless and asked it to fix those lines. The result I got was even more hilarious, and just as useless.

Disclaimer: this was the "dive deeper" button on a google search. No idea what fucking model it tried to use.

	▲	inavida 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think your skepticism is warranted. Top comments look a lot like ads to me.

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coliveira 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How much of the current usage is paying at least 1 cent per inference? AI providers are giving away AI for anyone to use. Only professionals and big companies, that are at most 1% of the market, are paying anything at this point.

	▲	selectodude an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Who knows? LLM providers losing money on every user and making it up on volume is a problem for them to deal with. I’m simply saying that the products are here to stay, even if (hopefully) the companies need to right-size their growth strategies. If Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 is the pinnacle of models and we never see a new one again, I think they’ll be useful and cash flow positive. OpenAI and Anthropic will, of course, go bankrupt. But the models themselves are absolutely valuable.

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rootusrootus 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How will that work, exactly? The chip makers are going to have a list of approved "cloud providers" and they will refuse to sell to anyone else?

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coliveira 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Cloud providers will use cheap investment capital to buy chips at increasing prices, while the public will be economically forced to get computational services from these cloud providers. After a few years, most software will work only when connected to cloud infrastructure, either for performance or for "safety" reasons. We're already seeing this with AI.

	▲	vbezhenar 18 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Cloud was there for many years and it's not that cheap, compared to ordinary servers you can buy. It's not clear how anything will change in the future.
	▲	Qem 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Because of this I hope the current AI fad is a bubble and it bursts soon. So instead of cheap investment drying up the market for individual consumers, we'll have lots of used corporate hardware selling at scrap prices to end users.
	▲	Yoric 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		aka "return of the Minitel"

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21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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ihsw 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]