There are some glaring local errors that make this analysis less than trustworthy. For instance, an assumption that corporate income tax applies directly to revenue, or a supposedly generous assumption that GPUs will fully depreciate after 3 years (6-year-old A100s are still in very high demand!). I would love to read a really well thought through investigation of inference costs and how they relate to token pricing, but I have low confidence that this is it.
AI profitability is mathematically impossible
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Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#12There are some glaring local errors that make this analysis less than trustworthy. For instance, an assumption that corporate income tax applies directly to revenue, or a supposedly generous assumption that GPUs will fully depreciate after 3 years (6-year-old A100s are still in very high demand!). I would love to read a really well thought through investigation of inference costs and how they relate to token pricing,…
Oh, just noticed one other very significant error: they evaluate revenue using input token pricing while counting capacity using generated tokens per second. There's a big gap between input and output token pricing, and between prefill TPS and generation TPS.
Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#13Why is no one talking about open source models being burned direct to chip and running inference at 10k-15k a second? OS models close the gap (via distillation) with frontier models, then get burned to chip, then offer commoditized inference via data farms or local plugins. With thought loops this fast even if the models are less smart they can be self correcting to level them selves up.
I've seen Taalas come up on HN, but only once. I'm not a HN fanatic but I end up around page 3 before I kill-filp my browser into oblivion. Currently Taalas has Llama 3.1 8B burned onto a chip and offer chatbot and API access. That said they aren't selling the chips yet, on their website at least.
I expect they are waiting for an openweight model they really feel is worth burning to a chip and/or training their own thing. I'd guess they could probably figure out some efficiency speedups if they are doing model development + hardware development at the same time. Though this seems different than Google and friends with their TPUs and similar. TPUs being general purpose chips than what Taalas is making. Still, probably something there.
Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you burn a model to a chip what happens if there's a better model?
I had the same question. I wondered if it'd be possible to use a rewritable chip or a socketed chip...
Not sure about sockets but I've seen a company with a wafer sized TPU thing or whatever. They claim to have an approach to route around the defects and I had to scroll past some press release I didn't read about the stock market, so someone believes in them I guess. They sell a mini-fridge that can handle a model with trillions of parameters with a contact sales button. Cerberas is their name. I actually ended up misremembering the name name of Taalas as Cerberas and discovered them when I was researching the above comment. Taalas burns models to chips. Cerberas makes pizza sized chips.
Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
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Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
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Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
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Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#18There are some glaring local errors that make this analysis less than trustworthy. For instance, an assumption that corporate income tax applies directly to revenue, or a supposedly generous assumption that GPUs will fully depreciate after 3 years (6-year-old A100s are still in very high demand!). I would love to read a really well thought through investigation of inference costs and how they relate to token pricing,…
> GPUs will fully depreciate after 3 years (6-year-old A100s are still in very high demand!)
Depreciation is a tax thing. While it is supposed to track useful life, it almost never does.
For example, houses are depreciated on a 28-year schedule. I'm typing this from a house built in 1902....
Google has yet to decommission any of its Trilliums, and the V1s shipped in 2015.
The prices to rent V2 (2017) and later are on https://cloud.google.com/tpu/pricing .
Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#19Why is no one talking about open source models being burned direct to chip and running inference at 10k-15k a second? OS models close the gap (via distillation) with frontier models, then get burned to chip, then offer commoditized inference via data farms or local plugins. With thought loops this fast even if the models are less smart they can be self correcting to level them selves up.
These already exist and there are very few use-cases because typically waiting a little longer for a significantly better answer is preferable.
Re: AI profitability is mathematically impossible
#20Why is no one talking about open source models being burned direct to chip and running inference at 10k-15k a second? OS models close the gap (via distillation) with frontier models, then get burned to chip, then offer commoditized inference via data farms or local plugins. With thought loops this fast even if the models are less smart they can be self correcting to level them selves up.
These already exist and there are very few use-cases because typically waiting a little longer for a significantly better answer is preferable.
Yes but we're talking about the fullness of time as things play out. Much improvements will be made to OS models via distillation and then you also get 15k sec to make it think better.