alt Hacker News> you can download it, run it on your systems
In theory, sure, but as other have pointed out you need to spend half a million on GPUs just to get enough VRAM to fit a single instance of the model. And you’d better make sure your use case makes full 24/7 use of all that rapidly-depreciating hardware you just spent all your money on, otherwise your actual cost per token will be much higher than you think.
In practice you will get better value from just buying tokens from a third party whose business is hosting open weight models as efficiently as possible and who make full use of their hardware. Even with the small margin they charge on top you will still come out ahead.
Replies
hsbauauvhabzb • today at 6:08 AM
Sure, but that’s an incredibly short term viewpoint.
There are a lot of companies who would gladly drop half a million on a GPU to have private inference that Anthropic or OpenAI can’t use to steal their data.
And that GPU wouldn’t run one instance, the models are highly parallelizable. It would likely support 10-15 users at once, if a company oversubscribed 10:1 that GPU supports ~100 seats. Amortized over a couple years the costs are competitive.