I mean, he has a point. Hardware is used way more efficiently in the data center, and any sort of deficit is best resolved in a centralized system due to more efficient resource allocation. The same setup could be used like 2 hours a day for your personal needs, or 24 hours a day to serve many people.
THAT SAID, their greed and unsatiable desire to make the number go up by hooking us into subscription economy with ever rising costs is what lead us here and it leaves us with little choice but to accept the less efficient way and host these things ourselves.
Remember the times not so long ago when self-hosting was an enthusiast hobby instead of necessity? Barely anyone non-geeky bothered with it, because what existed served people well. Now, having to build our own services remains the only sane choice, and the only way out of the nightmare Sam, among others, has built with his own hands.
The problem is that for less than a year’s subscription I can just buy my own equipment. So yeah it would be more sensible to centralise everything, but as you say the prices are too high.
I keep saying this, AI is not commercially viable yet, it should still be in the lab and they shouldn’t be trying to sell it as a product. Maybe in a few years they’ll be able to distill that down to something that will run on a reasonable amount of hardware and subscription prices can become sensible. There’s no way in hell I’m giving them $200 a month to automate something that I do actually know how to do myself. You can still run out of tokens despite giving them $2,400 a year, so where’s my incentive to not just go and buy a Mac mini?
It doesn’t fulfill the same user case. One can be used offline, the other cannot. One can be used without a subscription, the other cannot. One needs to be running constantly to meet targets, the other can be run whenever I want. One has that memory being used by very specific services, the other has that memory being used for whatever I want to use it for. Why should we care about an efficiency factor that really only benefits Sam Altman and ignores all other metrics?
If you think he has a point, I think you are being dazzled by the inherent proposition of an implementation in the ideal egalitarian society, which we do not live in nor is he really interested in providing.
I mean, he has a point. Hardware is used way more efficiently in the data center, and any sort of deficit is best resolved in a centralized system due to more efficient resource allocation. The same setup could be used like 2 hours a day for your personal needs, or 24 hours a day to serve many people.
THAT SAID, their greed and unsatiable desire to make the number go up by hooking us into subscription economy with ever rising costs is what lead us here and it leaves us with little choice but to accept the less efficient way and host these things ourselves.
Remember the times not so long ago when self-hosting was an enthusiast hobby instead of necessity? Barely anyone non-geeky bothered with it, because what existed served people well. Now, having to build our own services remains the only sane choice, and the only way out of the nightmare Sam, among others, has built with his own hands.
The problem is that for less than a year’s subscription I can just buy my own equipment. So yeah it would be more sensible to centralise everything, but as you say the prices are too high.
I keep saying this, AI is not commercially viable yet, it should still be in the lab and they shouldn’t be trying to sell it as a product. Maybe in a few years they’ll be able to distill that down to something that will run on a reasonable amount of hardware and subscription prices can become sensible. There’s no way in hell I’m giving them $200 a month to automate something that I do actually know how to do myself. You can still run out of tokens despite giving them $2,400 a year, so where’s my incentive to not just go and buy a Mac mini?
It doesn’t fulfill the same user case. One can be used offline, the other cannot. One can be used without a subscription, the other cannot. One needs to be running constantly to meet targets, the other can be run whenever I want. One has that memory being used by very specific services, the other has that memory being used for whatever I want to use it for. Why should we care about an efficiency factor that really only benefits Sam Altman and ignores all other metrics?
If you think he has a point, I think you are being dazzled by the inherent proposition of an implementation in the ideal egalitarian society, which we do not live in nor is he really interested in providing.
I think you mean effectively not efficiently, the resources use is the same if I local host or use a provider.