Joe

My caveats were clearly stated… After capital expenditure, it’s just operational costs, where electricity & cooling are the big ones.

At that point, it is insanely profitable to serve. The cheap API prices on open weights models hints at the profit margins involved in the US (the frontier labs and hyperscalers don’t open their books for us), unsurprisingly)

Therefore, the longer they can serve existing and lower cost models at the current rates, the better for their bottom line. It’s just common sense in business.

It doesn’t mean the company as a whole is profitable. I expect we’ll see turmoil in the coming months and years, and the prize will be compute capacity, with electricity & cooling options.

There is also a commercial aspect…

Bigger models are more expensive to train and serve…

Inference is currently insanely profitable if you have the hardware and the automation in place to support and serve it. At that point, it’s a money printing machine, and you want to squeeze as much out of it as you can.

While training new models is extremely expensive, and serving them probably makes less profit (at least initially).

Having an external brake applied to the frontier labs is likely good for their bottom line, while increasing hype and directing customers’ annoyance away from them.

It’s likely only a temporary benefit, though. The dragon will catch up and apply more pressure, both on inference price and capabilities.

Indeed.

350 jobs is a drop in the bucket of the terrible hiring and firing decisions that companies make all the time.

This one just had an AI spin to it, so it gets repeated and reposted ad infinitum.

It’s not just about current LLMs, though. LLMs are being made to work 24/7 on the next generation of models (and not just LLMs), which may be quite novel or just more effective. The next generation might be the one to worry about… Or the generation after that.

LLMs can be used like an army of monkeys with typewriters, with evals guaranteeing progress. It’s inefficient, but effective.

Assuming it is possible to make progress (and I think it is), the logical conclusion is that progress will be made, and AGI and ASI will come

it gets integrated into automated killchains including a nuclear arsenal, and i hope noone is stupid enough to

Have you ever met a human? 🤣

The main issue was the motherboard. It’s too “new” and I ended up having to build a bunch of drivers to just get my computer to work exactly what Windows provided out the box.

Ok… To be fair, the drivers for Windows are probably all third party drivers. HW companies tend not to provide standalone drivers for Linux - either they contribute specs and/or patches that get incorporated to mainline, or do squat and eventually someone will reverse engineer it and create a driver.

There is so much hate for Windows, but you can’t beat their commitment to stability and backwards compatibility.

This isn’t the problem you just described, ftr. Linux often has a delay in supporting the newest hardware, but then supports it well and for a long time. OSS in general is good at that.

For example: my Wacom tablet is no longer officially supported on Windows (by Wacom), while it works out of the box on Linux.

Another example: Windows 11 refuses older hardware - not backwards compatible.

If you are talking about software APIs, that’s a different story. eg. There’s not much point in targeting Linux native APIs for games, because wine usually works better.

Mumble?