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AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

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Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#231
post #18

I think I'm going to puke if I see one more "It's not X. It's Y." phrase or the word "load-bearing" used metaphorically.

I have been saying this and viscerally reacting to this “contrastive language” for months. it… “hits different”…

“Load-bearing” is a new one for me though, yuck.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#232

[flagged]

Very much agree - efficiency improvements are very real both on model and hardware side. The reliance on proprietary OpenAI/anthropic APIs is a problem though, one that will naturally resolve itself in the favour of self-hosted/open models.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's economies of scale and I don't understand where anyone is coming from that thinks they'll be better off buying their own hardware, why would you get a better deal on MATMULs/watt than the cloud providers ?

Another victim of Goldratt's Theory of Constraints. Some things are more important to optimize for than MATMULs per Watt. What that is I leave as an exercise to the student. May you realize what it is before it is too late.

Some individuals will choose some $10,000 hardware so they can keep freedom and privacy and that's well and good, my point is just that freedom and privacy is not what wins marketshare, and hence, IMHO, local LLMs are not going to catch up and surpass frontier models like some in this thread like to claim

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#234
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not getting easier to obtain hardware that can run models which are sufficiently useful to undercut frontier models, if anything the cost of such hardware has gone up by 25% or more just in the past 6 months.

I think hardware prices will come back down once we start seeing more efficiency improvements in models and hardware, and once more people and companies self-host models (which seems to be happening more and more these days). I think the massive infra/hardware expenditures of OpenAI and the like are going to end up unnecessary, leading to hardware price drops.

If companies decide to self-host, wouldn't that drive the demand and therefore prices up? Most companies currently do not have the needed infrastructure.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#236

The entire problem with "AI" is that it's easy to do without. The AI companies know it, the users know it - even the most pro AI agent manager knows it. Thought experiment: remove AI from the world right now, all of it - what do you have? Business as usual. This article doesn't do enough to underscore that - dreaded be the day I need to get an actual engineer to review a PR, right?

Isn't that always the case in the early stages of new technology adoption? It becomes less and less true as the new technology becomes more and more integrated. In the first few years after electric motors became a thing, one could have said the same thing. We would have just gone back to steam. If you tried to "do without them" now, society would collapse. So the question is not if we can do without them now, it's i…

The current LLM hype started, what, 5 years ago? It's an industry throwing billions of dollars (and teasing at the word trillions) around. It's had super bowl ads. It's a technology that's being mandated in corporate offices. It's basically the only thing the tech world ever talks about anymore. It's sucked all the air out of the room and occupies the whole stage.

Just how "early stage" is that, and how much more integration does this "new technology" need to be?

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#237
This is true of every vc backed company they rely on

And some parts of most publicly traded ones.

If it’s not a bootstrapped company with a single offering, there’s a highly likely something there doing is at a loss in the name of growth (and even there, the loss might come in the form of deferred compensation)

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>running large models on shared, dedicated hosted hardware at full utilization is going to be vastly more cost-efficient for the foreseeable future. That is only true right now because hundreds of billions of dollars are being burned by these AI companies to try to win market share. If you paid what it actually cost, your comment would likely be very different.

We don't know the parameters but it probably takes at least a H100 and possibly several to run a SOTA model. Given the pricing (25+k per H100 + hardware to run it) and power (700W per H100 + hardware to run it), I don't see how anyone except for a largish company can afford to run this.

Are you serious? It’s multiple nodes to run a frontier model (a node is 8x GPUs), and they aren’t running on H100s. You are looking at 32+ GPUs.
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