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walrus01today at 8:38 AM4 repliesview on HN

There are a number of use cases where sending the contents of your context and prompts (and the resulting output) to a 3rd party service is off the table as an option, and people will compromise speed for data sovereignty. And not everyone's electricity is equally expensive, I pay about $0.075 USD per kWh. It would for example cost me about $48 a month of electricity (not counting cost of cooling) to run a quad socket Dell R940 for a month.


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mdasentoday at 2:08 PM

That's an unusually low electric rate for the US - way below the lowest state average which is Idaho at 12.4 cents. It's certainly possible that you are getting 7.5 cents including delivery, but I've had friends say that they're "getting 13 cents per kWh" here in Massachusetts, but that's just the supply rate and the delivery is another ~18 cents.

There are parts of states like Grant County Washington that have cheap hydro power, but it's very rare for power to be that cheap in the US. Even if this applies to you, it won't apply to the vast majority of people on here who will have electric rates 2-4x higher.

Average electric rates by region:

    New England            28.1 cents
    Mid Atlantic           25.1 cents
    East North Central     20.8 cents
    West North Central     14.8 cents
    South Atlantic         16.1 cents
    East South Central     15.5 cents
    Mountain               14.6 cents
    Pacific Contiguous     26.1 cents
    Pacific Noncontiguous  42.1 cents
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
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ljloleltoday at 2:51 PM

can send safely context if there’s confidential computing ala my site https://trustedrouter.com/

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fookertoday at 8:51 AM

Great, so the other member of the set matters for you more than cost.

Do you actually need to run the state of art model at 5 tokens per second instead of a qwen or whatever 7b or 30b model at 100 tokens per second?

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light_hue_1today at 9:51 AM

As someone who has worked in two industries that are at the maximal end of data sensitivity and privacy this comes across as a tinfoil hat issue not a real business requirement. In such cases we've always found ways to trade dollars for the privacy we need without having to run our own inference at excruciating slow speeds.

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