alt Hacker NewsA key difference is that the cost to execute a cab ride largely stayed the same. Gas to get you from point A to point B is ~$5, and there's a floor on what you can pay the driver. If your ride costs $8 today, you know that's unsustainable; it'll eventually climb to $10 or $12.
But inference costs are dropping dramatically over time, and that trend shows no signs of slowing. So even if a task costs $8 today thanks to VC subsidies, I can be reasonably confident that the same task will cost $8 or less without subsidies in the not-too-distant future.
Of course, by then we'll have much more capable models. So if you want SOTA, you might see the jump to $10-12. But that's a different value proposition entirely: you're getting significantly more for your money, not just paying more for the same thing.
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> But inference costs are dropping dramatically over time, and that trend shows no signs of slowing. So even if a task costs $8 today thanks to VC subsidies, I can be reasonably confident that the same task will cost $8 or less without subsidies in the not-too-distant future.
I'd like to see this statement plotted against current trends in hardware prices ISO performance. Ram, for example, is not meaningfully better than it was 2 years ago, and yet is 3x the price.
I fail to see how costs can drop while valuations for all major hardware vendors continue to go up. I don't think the markets would price companies in this way if the thought all major hardware vendors were going to see margins shrink a la commodity like you've implied.
What if we run out of GPU? Out of RAM? Out of electricity?
AWS is already raising GPU prices, that never happened before. What if there is war in Taiwan? What if we want to get serious about climate change and start saving energy for vital things ?
My guess is that, while they can do some cool stuff, we cannot afford LLMs in the long run.
Your point could have made sense but the amount of inference per request is also going up faster than the costs are going down.
>But inference costs are dropping dramatically over time,
Please prove this statement, so far there is no indication that this is actually true - the opposite seems to be the case. Here are some actual numbers [0] (and whether you like Ed or not, his sources have so far always been extremely reliable.)
There is a reason the AI companies don't ever talk about their inference costs. They boast with everything they can find, but inference... not.
[0]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/