<story><title>The Subprime AI Crisis</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pocketarc</author><text>I think the main problem with AI sustainability is that all this VC investment is burning through ungodly amounts of money to produce something that provides no moat.&lt;p&gt;Even if all AI investment froze tomorrow, I&amp;#x27;d still have my 405B Llama 3.1 model, along with countless other smaller models, and I&amp;#x27;d run them to do whatever the heck I felt like doing, with no commitment to any provider.&lt;p&gt;Writing code with AI? I could swap to a local model. Costs nothing. Provides no revenue to any VC-backed company.&lt;p&gt;Yes, bigger models will always command a premium for the highest end of reasoning. But you don&amp;#x27;t always need the best possible reasoning. GPT-3 and early GPT-4 were more than good enough for a ton of use cases last year.&lt;p&gt;And we&amp;#x27;ve seen the pace of development in the open source world these past two years. The open source community (Meta in particular) has completely obliterated the commercial value of these models.&lt;p&gt;If there were no &amp;quot;weights available&amp;quot; models, OpenAI would have an incredible, unbeatable moat, and they would be worth truly astounding amounts of money. But as it stands, we all have free, unfettered access to local models far better and cheaper than models that were flagship 18 months ago, and close enough to the performance of current flagship models that it won&amp;#x27;t make a difference for a ton of use cases.&lt;p&gt;There is no way to justify the current level of investment, with local models being freely available.&lt;p&gt;The assumption I&amp;#x27;m making, of course, is that this transformer technology won&amp;#x27;t ever lead to AGI - it will just be another tool in our ever-expanding tool-belt.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Subprime AI Crisis</title><url>https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>memothon</author><text>I always find it really strange when articles like this claim nobody is paying for generative AI. I can&amp;#x27;t find reliable stats on this but there are at least a million ChatGPT Plus subscribers.  Does that not count?&lt;p&gt;It takes time for new advancements to get proliferated through the economy.</text></comment>