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| ▲ | amelius 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What if the AI companies start selling the hardware with their models? I.e., you get a locked down device with access to their AI and maybe a way to run third party apps. Of course the developers of those apps will have to pay a percentage of their revenue. Sound familiar? | | |
| ▲ | szatkus 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Most likely those models would be extracted from the hardware in no time. | |
| ▲ | throwaway85825 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | More likely they would sell a chip with the model etched in silicon for the dramatically higher token/s. |
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| ▲ | konaraddi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There will be demand for both | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's never going to happen. By the time you can run current frontier models on your $10k desktop the frontier will have massively advanced and people will want those models instead. | | |
| ▲ | blurbleblurble 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's going to happen very soon, which is why these frontier labs are scrambling to shut down open source language models. There's an existential risk threatening their obscene returns. | | |
| ▲ | mrlonglong an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It is for that reason they are being archived and torrented as a very large middle finger. | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It's going to happen very soon Why? You can't just assert it. There are very good reasons to think it won't happen soon, and you've given no reasons to think it will happen soon. | | |
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| ▲ | bunderbunder 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m not so sure about that. Already AI vendors are back to cutting prices to try and keep customers from cutting back on their usage. My own employer is working hard at pivoting to much smaller fine-tuned models for established use cases, and seeing model performance improvement in addition to large inference cost reductions. Being able to run them locally hasn’t exactly been a disaster for devex, either. It may turn out that demand for SOTA frontier models isn’t so limitless after all. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Every product follows demand curves. At a price of 0 you could find infinite usage. This has nearly zero relation to how much it costs to provide the product. | | |
| ▲ | bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Except of course it relates. All else being equal, we will prefer $X COGS over $2X COGS because that helps us with both profit margins and price competition. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It relates in the sense there's a minimum cost of production without losses, not the actual price people are willing to pay. | | |
| ▲ | bunderbunder an hour ago | parent [-] | | Framing it in terms of the price people might be willing to pay for a single product in isolation frames the point I was making, which was about price competition, right out of the picture. Maybe I'd be willing to pay $10 for product A if I had other options. But if there's a product B for $3 that's not quite as nice but still ticks all my boxes, then product instantly becomes a lot less attractive. |
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| ▲ | kingleopold 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This + your ROI in $10k device will be always lower than busy datacenter, its literally math. They sell free compute to others when you dont use it, you will never sell at that level or even you magically sell home compute, you will not compete at price | |
| ▲ | hypfer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm not sure if this prediction will hold true. We're not seeing the progress in those "frontier models" that we have previously seen. There's certainly still gas left in tank tank, but we're way into the diminishing returns by now. Cloud inference still beats hardware investments by orders of magnitude of course, but that's only if your data doesn't really matter to you. | | |
| ▲ | gehsty 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s a constant tension in computing that has been around since mainframes and clients… Neither is going to disappear. My general feeling is normal people care more about how thin and light something is than their privacy, so if data center powered LLMs will have a strong future. | | |
| ▲ | hypfer 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hmm I'm not 100% sure about that, given that edge is very viable, and the geopolitical climate has changed quite significantly. I agree that datacenters are not going to go away, but I have doubts that the buildup that has happened is really going to pay off for most operators. |
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| ▲ | airspresso 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We are certainly not in the diminishing returns phase for LLM progress. No sign of that yet. | | |
| ▲ | bunderbunder 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’ll grant that for specialized applications like coding agents and mathematics, but even there I suspect that most the real gains are actually taking place in the harness. But I suspect returns may have already diminished into negative territory for at least some other use cases. One of my least favorite job responsibilities in this brave new era is figuring out how to avoid performance and behavior regressions when an older model were using for some application reaches end of life. It’s getting uncommon for me to look at our benchmark results and say, “Oh, good, it does better on one of the newer models!” | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >suspect that most the real gains are actually taking place in the harness. Part of the reason harnesses work well is you can run a lot of agents in parallel. That doesn't slow down demand. | | |
| ▲ | hypfer 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That is true, but the eventual realization that more machines doing more coin flips in parallel does not mean "more work gets done" might. LLMs are amazing tech, but they're terrible without oversight. More agents faster just makes reality collapse on them quicker. But yeah, you're right, temporarily, this will still push demand. But the topic was about "diminishing returns" as in "tech getting better". Not as in "customer spending". | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's kind of weird because more machines working together does mean more work gets done. Coin flips and weighted coin flips are totally different things. Any biases weights towards reality push you closer to reality when you use them. New models keep being able to use more and more agents on longer time frames. Your hypothesis doesn't look like what we're measuring. | | |
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| ▲ | bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I had actually been thinking more about all the non-LLM functionality that go into the harnesses. I'm not going to name names and I haven't done any rigorous testing, but my general impression is that choice of harness matters more than choice of model. In terms of basic task completion success specifically, not code aesthetics. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | A perfect harness will not extract gold from a dumb model. It's a system that builds on each other, though we've not probed that frontier much to have a good intuition on what effects what. |
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| ▲ | 3eb7988a1663 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | One thing that I really want to know - the better models from today vs a year ago - what has changed. They have already pre-trained on all available public data. Scooping up the last percentage of archaic texts which were never digitized is not going to move the needle. Is it just that the providers are generating tons of synthetic datasets on coding tasks so that the models get more exposure to the right thing to do? Every time someone points out an LLM stupidity they add some training data to patch over the weakness (trivial to generate "there are two 'l's in llama")? |
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| ▲ | hypfer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well I mean if I wanted to be extra pedantic, I would argue that we've been in that phase since LLMs were first introduced. Before that, we had 0.
After that, we had more than 1. A leap as far as that is hard to recreate. But that wasn't my point. That's just trolling. The actual point is that LLMs aren't gaining new capabilities anymore. They just get more reliable at the ones they already have; turning what was a coin flip to some higher probability. That's (intuitively speaking, not strictly mathematically speaking) kinda the mathematical definition of diminishing returns. |
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| ▲ | 48488448 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | they really dont want to hear this bro lol | | |
| ▲ | hypfer 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I can see that by those reddit-style vote swings, but who are "they", exactly? Who is so emotionally invested into random comment sections being purely positive about their pet.. uuuuuuuh.. tech? Very weird. |
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| ▲ | EA-3167 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Or even more amusing in time for the bubble to burst, I hope the big RAM makers end up holding the whole bag for that. Greedy bastards. | | |
| ▲ | glub 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Nearly the entire reason we're in this mess is because RAM/SSD/HDD makers are terrified of AI bubble bursting. Long-term contracts, not building new fabs - they're in full on hedging mode right now. | |
| ▲ | bethekidyouwant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Since you’re not greedy when there is a memory glut I’m sure you’ll be willing to pay extra to make it fair. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not at all, I’m going to relax with a cooling drink and watch the consequences of this unbelievably destructive and wasteful venture implode. I also adore the idea that it's on the customer to be "fair" to a company that dumped us a group in favor of chasing B2B money. Their choice, their consequences. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Internet is a fad, it will implode at any moment. | | |
| ▲ | EA-3167 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | In fact as a business opportunity it did just that because the massive investment in the mid-late 1990's was without anything like a connection to profitability or sustainable demand. It took years after that crash for the concept of e-commerce to begin both a recovery and evolution into what we see today. I expect something similar for AI. It's useful tech... just not very profitable tech, and certainly not to the tune of trillions of dollars worth of public demand. The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises, but the tech will survive and thrive. | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >The promises of superintelligence, replacing everyone, and the rest of the hype will die with the companies who made the promises The hype will die but there are many reasons why super intelligence and robots are a separate entity from said hype. Look, back a few decades and tell someone our gdp would be in the trillions and it's likely they'd have a hard time believing you. A huge portion of our products that we use day to day would be complete science fiction to them. All we're negotiating at this point is the timescale it will take. | | |
| ▲ | card_zero an hour ago | parent [-] | | Unpredictable things happen routinely, therefore these specific unpredictable things will happen? | | |
| ▲ | pixl97 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | These things aren't really unpredictable. Work long enough on a robot with more dexterity and you will get just that. The timetable on when it happens is a bit more up in the air, economic downturns and wars can have huge impacts on it. But in my mind robots and superintelligence are inevitable unless there is a massive setback in humanity before then. Nature already did it once. We're not inventing something totally new. Add in every new invention and bit of intelligence we build on and actualize pushes us that much closer to the goal. Information technology allows this to speed up even further with easy sharing of information and testing. Superintelligence is not like faster than light travel. We have many frameworks that show us FTL is impossible. I don't believe there is a single widely accepted framework that shows there is some limit to intelligence and we're near it. Intelligence isn't even a singular thing. My calculator is a super intelligent adder compared to me. It would seem highly improbable that somehow nature random walked into making brains the most efficient general intelligence device in all dimensions and scales. |
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