> The difference now is that AI can make low effort work look high effort at a surface level.
True, but we'll also get higher standards I think. It's become easier to do things, so skilled people can do more complicated things. We compare to what humans can achieve.
If that is true, why are the open model inference providers on OpenRouter (and on their own website) so expensive then? It must be the hardware. I've checked and a lot of it it just the HBM, with the NVidia tax being a smaller but also large factor.
Nvidia's top AI chip, Rubin, sells in 72-GPU racks for about $3.5–7.8M. A rack running Xiaomi's MiMo V2.6 Pro could generate roughly 150–300B tokens a day, worth about $130–260k at Xiaomi's API price. That's a payback of a few weeks in theory.
If he has 2x 20x OpenAI, that means he's running heavy jobs that burn through usage. So Kimi must be there to reduce OpenAI usage. With Astra + Fable, I burn through my 5x OpenAI and 20x Claude real fast. I do have a backup GLM sub but I've never had to use it. So the prediction that AI would become more expensive seems to be panning out. Partly outweighed by better models of course.
A lot of the discussion is about AI vs no AI, which is valid, but I care about local AI vs centralized AI. Hopefully hardware will become more affordable. A hopefully irrational fear I have is that it'll be like house prices: only ever goes up.
Off topic, on the house price fear - the bubble does occasionally burst! Japan (famously), and also here's a story about Canada & New Zealand, and perhaps Australia.
I think the Pi units have much higher margins on higher RAM versions plus RAM is expensive, so the 16GB is indeed a bad deal. For my workloads I heavily use all onboard peripeals, GPU and CPU, but need only 1GB RAM. So I get a good deal even compared to Chinese alternatives.
Why do you think they are going down? My impression is that their prices are actually good. Especially for CM4 compatible alternatives. They fab in China just like everybody else. Although they do some or all assembly (soldering) in UK I think.
We're centralizing knowledge in a few massive companies vs. the prevous situation which was of ad-hoc knowledge sharing across volunteers. I don't see how this new AI world is more "owning together" than what we had right before it, I'd argue we have more centralisation than before. When hardware gets cheaper, that will change things massively I think, but that isn't happening yet.
This is the concern. What is the difference between centralizing ownership of ideas in a few massive companies with ~15 CEOs and centralizing ownership of ideas in a Politburo with ~15 people?
Will the United States suffer the same problems as the Soviet Union when ~15 people control and own all the ideas?
True, but we'll also get higher standards I think. It's become easier to do things, so skilled people can do more complicated things. We compare to what humans can achieve.
reply