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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

#171

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

djeastm wrote: post #141
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the good news may be that if/when there is a major pricing correction, that many of the people using free or $20/mo subscriptions to generate social media commentary may balk at the real cost and go back to writing it themselves. One can at least hope.

I think there will always be a free tier that they'll be willing to use. Even if it sounds hackneyed, those folks will still use it because many people are not discerning readers anyway.

Despite what I just said, I do hope so, because I'm really not inclined to pay for it, at least not very much. I don't need another $100-200/mo bill in my life, and it doesn't provide that level of value as a chatbot. Google is enough.

I'm not sure that free tier will necessarily continue forever though, unless there is a way to monetize it (presumably by advertising, or by selling data they've gleaned about the user), or perhaps if there is no privacy and the provider is treating you as a source of free data. Right now we're still in the market-share grabbing "never mind the profits, count the users" stage.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#172

Post by pjc50 »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #142
slashdave wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are discussing how rapid development has been, and now you want to freeze your model in silicon?

Genuine question from a place of ignorance: what in the silicon pipeline makes it take 2-4years to produce chips with a new model on them? Curious what the process bottleneck is.

I think you could get it down to three months between weight changes, if you can encode it in metal layers only. The remaining limits are the fab lead time, and the cost of a metal respin (hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars depending on process).

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#173

Post by phendrenad2 »

the_gipsy wrote: post #54
Sharlin wrote: 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.

It's not metaphorical. It's load-bearing.

If you want the belt-and-suspenders version, it's both.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#174

Post by __s »

manmal wrote: post #144
__s wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still need the hardware I've got a 128GB strix halo staying warm at home, it has nothing on top models with big budget. It's good supplement to low end plans for offloading grunt work / initial triage

Have you looked into DwarfStar 4?

Been away from home for nearly a month, so was mostly going off Qwen 3.5 122b-a10b (Q4?) / Qwen 3.6 35b-a3b (Q8) / Gemma4 31b (Q8)

Thanks for suggestion tho, tool by antirez is always going to pique interest, I'll check it out when I'm finally home again

Tho says Metal / CUDA, so doesn't seem friendly to Linux AMD system

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#175

Post by yalogin »

If it’s replacing developers it makes sense to cost more than 20 or 100 per month. The real issue for these llm companies is that they are yet to show value in other areas. Without that they will be relegated to just coding. That is the rush right now for them. What other workflows can they automate. I guess every paperwork can be automated. Once the other areas are developed they will switch the pricing model

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#176

Post by intothemild »

evo_9 wrote: post #79

Every AI subscription is a ticking time bomb for the frontier provider; within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden. The floor will fall out of the enterprise market for all the frontier companies.

I've spent the last month bringing in a small demo of what the future could be like, running Qwen, Gemma, and Deepseek, behind LiteLLM so we can monitor token usage, and instead of some dumb ass "tokenmaxxing" we're actively trying to get the cost of inference both down, and in-house.

Boss is happy, very happy. We're rolling it out more widely now.

But this is the future.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#177

Post by jazzyjackson »

lumost wrote: post #152
stingraycharles wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics of local AI just doesn’t make sense. A model like Opus is - supposedly - something like 5T parameters, which is likely something like 3TB of GPU memory. Local models never reach the % utilization that cloud providers have (80%+), and they’re always going to be much better than local models for this reason.

Capex, opex, quality, and volume are tricky things to balance. On balance, pc/mobile are cheaper to operate than equivalent cloud and on prem deployments. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that in 2 years time an opus 5 quality model will be etched into silicon for high performance local inference. Then you just upgrade your model every 2-3 years by upgrading your hardware.

I haven't been following anyone baking models into ASICs, is it not still necessary to pack just as many transistors onto a chip, whether it's an NPU or GPU, ASIC or not you still need to hold hundreds of gigabytes in memory, so how is it cheaper to bake it onto custom silicon than running it on commodity VRAM? (Asking because I don't know!)

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#178

Post by [deleted] »

chermi wrote: post #149
vb-8448 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier Unless there isn't some important breakthrough in hw production or in models architecture, it's quite the opposite: bigger, more expensive and more energy-intensive hw is needed today compared to 1 or 2 years ago.

Per frontier token. You're not calculating the cost of a fixed quality asset here. Old hw running non-frontier models will be very valuable. In fact, we have two direct examples: older server gpus actually appreciating and the very obvious fact that not everyone always use MAX FULL EFFORT BEST MODEL no matter what.

[deleted]

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#179

Post by iwontberude »

crazygringo wrote: post #108
evo_9 wrote: post #79

Every AI subscription is a ticking time bomb for the frontier provider; within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden. The floor will fall out of the enterprise market for all the frontier companies.

> within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden Based on what? The RAM requirements alone are extraordinary. No, running large models on shared, dedicated hosted hardware at full utilization is going to be vastly more cost-efficient for the foreseeable future.

I strongly disagree. Humans are so insanely well incentivized here with trillions in market share to make localized AI good enough and that’s the only benchmark they need.
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