alt Hacker News> Of course, this was a hugely poor read of where the costs actually lie in AI. Training - while no doubt capex intensive - is a fixed, up-front cost. You spend hundreds of millions to train a model, then you are "done".
I don't understand this point that people make. If you're consistently needing[0] to train new models and the cost of training relative to the % improvement seems to go higher, isn't this just a constant cost that you continue to bear? The footnote seems to allude to this, but then sort of waves it away anyways. Also are there continuing incremental training costs to keep models relevant? Or do they only have knowledge of events up to the day they were trained?
[0] needing, because you have competitors and people expect more and more.
These models rely on knowledge that are embedded in their weights, if a new library is released, a new linux version comes out, some new protocol succeeds the previous one, you want your llm to know about it. Sure you can just add that into the context window, but that has its own problems.
Unless new research, there are a few which look promising, gives a new method, training is going to be a constant cost sink.
On top of this, if you stop training, it is 6 months until someone releases an open weights model and now you are competing to give the lowest price for the same product.
Also we can't forget that this is a business that *has to* be in the global labor industry, not just a tech tool, they have to have much better models to justify the trillion dollar evaluation