Oh come on bubble, why won’t you crash already?
Trust me bro we’re so close to profitability bro, just need this IPO to secure funding one last time bro then we’ll be profitable bro I swear.
What is the actual “cost” after they buy the hardware, is that $1000 really pure power usage cost?
The problem is that the hardware has a 5 or 6 year depreciation schedule on paper, but NVIDIA keeps saying that their next generation chip will be twice as good as their last chip so there is a FOMO schedule of like every two years.
I’m curious as well. My knowledge is probably quite outdated, but from what I understood the training part is what’s expensive and then querying the model is pretty cheap. Is it still true (or was it ever) that the generated answers on search engines are cheaper to generate than the actual search results?
I find that hard to believe, I recently had to uninstall co-pilot after it weaseled its way into my search bar. Its not an exageration to say that my PC literally ran cyberpunk 2077 with pathtracting better than it ran the fucking windows search bar with co-pilot.
That’s just a shitty front end interface implementation, it has nothing to do with the actual inference run by the models.
Look at the public numbers, it seems true. Copilot on your taskbar is just windows being garbage, not the AI being bad. Just look at self-hosted AI and measure the power costs of your queries. It’s tiny.
It is sorta. Training is orders of magnitudes more intensive than inference, but we infer billions of times within a model generation.
Good thing I don’t personally pay them anything
reminder than during 2019 there were streaming services popping left and right, all showing tremendous growth because they started from zero, and articles were about how bad Netflix was doing due to having practically no growth compared with the competition (they already had a massive subscriber base). Twist? Netflix was the only streaming service that was actually making a profit, the rest were a massive loss but big growth.
Needless to say most of those streaming services died; who remembers DC streaming service, or Yahoo’s? While Netflix is basically as stong as ever, despite the prevalent enshitification happening through the whole industry.
Point of the story? shareholders don’t care about stable profitable business, only cancerous growth. AI is like that, zero profits, ton of cost, but as long as they show growth the shareholders are happy, regardless of how cooked the books are.
2019 Yahoo
My immediate thought, there is no way Yahoo! Screen survived into 2019.
I looked it up and Yahoo! Screen (which featured Community season 6) was shutdown in January 2016. But Yahoo! View launched in late 2016 (as a Hulu-like replacement), and that did shutter in mid 2019.
So Yahoo! was already dead, but it also died for real in 2019.
Imagine having a streaming service so bad it fails twice
Isn’t that kind of Yahoo!'s business model?
who remembers DC streaming service, or Yahoo’s?
Quibi will always have a place in my heart. Or, at least, my golden arm
Of course it is, it’s essentially a scam. They just need enough humans to keep investing until they check out and run with a bailout.
I don’t get why companies get to legally bailout like this. Why do people have to suffer for their bullshit? Enslave the CEOs if you have to make things right, leave the people out of it.
Many applications are suboptimal to say the least but what’s been done with alpha fold and recently in mathematics is very far from a scam. Not to bring up what’s also been accomplished in cyber security. These models are proving open problems that have been around for decades and finding serious vulnerabilities. The issue is consistency and efficiency. Of course the other issue in making them stronger is continual learning and long horizon planning. I think too much investment came in too quickly and what is provided to the masses currently isn’t consistent or efficient enough. That said as a math and comp sci grad and someone who works in the field it’s been absolutely mind blowing to watch what’s already been done. In 2010 the concept of an artificial mind solving something like the Erdős unit distance conjecture would have been seen as pure sci-fi, maybe something we would achieve closer to 2100 than 2026.
For reference, it took Uber about 17 years to become profitable and Spotify 18. They were hemorrhaging cash for over a decade and a half before finally hitting their stride. As for the current AI development it’s honestly from 2017 when the white paper on transformers came out where shit started getting serious, so it’s been about 9 years since investors were serious. Before that point it was all passion projects, absolute moon shots as they call them.
Although, most people aren’t talking about Alphafold when they’re talking about AI. They’re usually specifically referring to the generative transformer models that are currently all the rage.
I doubt anyone would care too much about a linear regression model, or multi-layer peceptron , for example.
I’m pretty sure a lot of them don’t know the difference or understand how mind breaking it is that some of these achievements are happening. Of course alpha fold is old news and the solutions to the Erods problems is something that should be raising eyebrows. These models are fundamentally just math and a model that’s better than humans at math can theoretically design a stronger model than us.
they are spending infinite money for every $1 i pay them
That’s not good business
Love that for them
Good thing all the companies leaning hard on AI 10 X’d their profits… Wait…
looks inside
But if you use the $100 a month Claude Max plan, and you would use it to the weekly limit by going full ‘agentic coding’ (so almost no human in the loop) you would use an amount of tokens that would cost you more than $1000 at API-pricing.
If I watch 600 movies every day on my netflix subscription I am using more energy than I pay them for. Obviously everyone is like me. Therefore they are losing money overall.
Wait, their (netflix) earnings say they made a profit last quarter. But my calculations were waterproof!
Probably anthropic are not net positive, but they are not spending 10x what people pay them for tokens.
I’m not going to read this whole article, is that opex??
