alt Hacker NewsI don't think this is accurate.
Even using multiple windows in parallel for as many as 5-10 hours per day, I find that I am not fully using my claude max (20x) and chatgpt pro (20x) accounts. I can for sure use up the claude max account, but chatgpt either gives me a free reset before I run out of tokens or I just fail to use the full quota. The quota for Sol seems like 10x that of Claude Opus at the same level, and forget Fable, you can use a 5 hour quota in 20 minutes.
But lets do the math:
Lets say a 20k workstation can run 1 inference at a time at the same speed you get with Sol hosted by openai (big assumption) and run an equally capable model (big assumption).
Each month this gives you about 100-170 inference hours on a Sol 20x Pro account, and 720 hours (if you utilize 24/7) on the workstation.
Assuming a 36 month amortization before the workstation has to be replaced due to no longer being able to run frontier models or is too inefficient due to electrical costs or what have you:
The monthly workstation cost is about $550 capex and $150 electricity -> $700/month
You would need about 6 Pro accounts to reach that capacity, which would cost you $1200 a month.
But this fails because:
- You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
- During work hours you are capable of utilizing more than 1 concurrent session. 6 Sol accounts would support as many as 20-30 during working hours, not all the time but if you could burst to that many (don't forget sub-agents and agent directed parallel agent workloads).
- In 1 year the cost of Sol level models is likely to cost a fraction of what it does now.
this leads to:
Workstation 1 Sol Pro 2 Sol Pro
Monthly cost $700 $200 $400
Raw capacity (hrs) 720 120 240
Usable capacity (hrs) 100-130 120 240
Concurrent sessions 1 3-5 6-10
$ per usable hour ~$6.00 $1.67 $1.67
Usable hours per $700 ~115 ~420 ~420Replies
"You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day."
I have agents running 24/7 doing research, in fact I would argue this how they will be used for most programming tasks in the near future. For chatting, I agree local inference makes no sense. But for tasks that run continually, I'm not so sure. Personal computers took a while, local inference will too, but I think it will happen.
Subscriptions are, and will likely remain, the best deal in town. Unfortunately, larger companies aren't able to do that. When your monthly token costs are in the $5-10k range, the local inference starts to look a lot more attractive
> - You most likely can't utilize the workstation 24/7. Your work hours will be concentrated into 6-10 hours per day.
isn't the whole point of all this ..... agents? isn't that what literally everyone is always clammering about in these threads? in which case the workstation is useful 720 hours out of 720 hours.
Some people neglect to factor in electricity costs. Some homes have very expensive service.