To bang on the same damn drum: Open Weight models are 6 months to a year behind SOTA. If you were building a company a year ago based on what AI could do then, you can build a company today with models that run locally on a user's computer. Yes that may mean requiring your customers to buy Macbooks or desktops with Nvidia GPUs, but if your product actually improves productivity by any reasonable amount, that purchase…
The beginning of scarcity in AI
171–180 of 239 posts
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#172We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.
> The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago. For the very largest models, I think the latter effect dominates quite easily.
> It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago.
I agree; I got some coding value out of Qwen for $10/m (unlimited tokens); a nice harness (and some tight coding practices) lowers the distance between SOTA and 6mo second-tier models.
If I can get 80% of the way to Anthropic's or OpenAI's SOTA models using 10$/m with unlimited tokens, guess what I am going to do...
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#173We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.
The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up Or they'll price the true cost in from the start, and make massive profits until the VC subsidies end... I know which one I'd do.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#174How convenient, especially since everything has some LLM slop interaction.
But that rug isnt going to pull itself!
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago. For the very largest models, I think the latter effect dominates quite easily.
>> The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. > It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago. I agree; I got some coding value out of Qwen for $10/m (unlimited tokens); a nice harn…
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
No shit. People are just figuring this out now? This is the “Building my entire livelihood on Facebook, oh no what?” all over again. Oh no sorry I forgot, your laptops LLM can draw a potato, let me invest in you.
Seriously. > We just had a realization during a demo call the other day These tools have been around for years now. As they've improved, dependency on them has grown. How is any organization only just realizing this? That's like only noticing the rising water level once it starts flooding the second floor of the house.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#177We just had a realization during a demo call the other day: The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. Not being dependent on LLMs for your fundamental product’s value will be a major advantage, at least in pricing.
> The companies that are entirely AI-dependent may need to raise prices dramatically as AI prices go up. It's not that clear. Sure, hardware prices are going up due to the extremely tight supply, but AI models are also improving quickly to the point where a cheap mid-level model today does what the frontier model did a year ago. For the very largest models, I think the latter effect dominates quite easily.
Your company may have the resources to effectively shift to cheaper models without service degradation, but your AI tooling vendors might not. If you pay for 5 different AI-driven tools, that's 5 different ways your upstream costs may increase that you'll need to pass on to customers as well.
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
ASML only makes a certain number of machines a year that can do extreme ultra-violet lithography. Also - turbine blades limit power, according to Elon. Between them - we cannot chip fabs past a certain rate, and we cannot stand up the datacenter to run these desired chips past a certain rate. Different people believe one or the other is the 'true' current bottleneck. The turbine supply chain scaling looks much more t…
If only there were some form of cheap, widely manufactured power generation technology that didn't use turbines... Are they really going to wait until 2030 to get more turbines rather than invest in solar?
Re: The beginning of scarcity in AI
#179Trying to up-tier fractional improvements in something that can't be quantified easily, and !BONUS! with gated access it can't be as easily analyzed by the (low profit) AI analyzers/benchmarkers.
Foster paranoia among top executives that the fractional/debatable improvement is a MUST HAVE to STAY COMPETITIVE in your industry.
Meanwhile, I have not seen any improvement in software in the now almost ?three to four? years than mainstream LLM and AI coding assistance has arrived on the scene.
Although I will hold out the possibility that software has actually gotten far worse for the end user, because AI code is being dedicated to revenue enhancement and dark data collection.