These companies are clearly calling things that are R&D that aren't R&D.

If you're building a model that lasts a few months before it's no longer the most current one, and maybe a year before it's completely unusable by anybody, then that should just be COGS.

Doing that, however, would betray the real problem with this business model.

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Gigachad 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are also likely overestimating the useful lifespan of the hardware. They keep extending the number of years on the GPUs to make the accounting look better.

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BLKNSLVR 2 hours ago | parent [-]

When are these GPUs going to be available on the second hand market?

	▲	devsda 16 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If the supply side constraints remains the same, I doubt they'll be releasing their GPUs as they could be considered strategic assets. Their current moat is largely hardware right. In few years open weight models may be good enough for anything but advanced usecases. With right hardware, competition may grab the lower end of market using open models. There's also potential loss of interesting training data from real conversations. I see more downsides than upsides.
	▲	Gigachad 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Presumably when the power consumption costs more than the cost of replacement. It’s not so much that these GPUs stop working after 3 years, but that newer GPUs can handle more requests with less power for the same purchase price. So the useful value of the GPU degrades until eventually it’s cheaper to replace than to keep running.
	▲	fragmede 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Standard depreciation is 3-5 years.

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lokar 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Calling it capex with an appropriate depreciation schedule is more appropriate.