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points by hedora 2 days ago | 0 comments
It's not the Chinese models' fault those two companies' business models are doomed. Quantization and model architecture improvements have gotten a few orders of magnitude win, and hardware has gotten another (and I'll bet another 10-100x is coming soon).

OpenAI/Anthropic remind me of Silcon Graphics. Sure, lots of people bought those workstations before MP3 / MPEG video were a thing, and before Voodoo came out with the first cheap 3D accelerators. All the tech trends (software and hardware) back in the 1990's were against them, but their valuation stayed high for a bit longer than rational.

Unless there's some second step function change in AI, LLMs comparable to today's state of the art are going to be running on $1-2K machines in a few years, and they'll be doing it fast and with low wattage. There are already a dozen companies that know how to build that, including in the US, Europe and China.

Unlike SGI: Hopefully, given all the political corruption and fraud in this space, we'll see jail time for the guilty parties.

[–] gmueckl 2 days ago
SGI did try to pivot their business towards less expensive workstations, but they didn't manage to create a compelling product. The pivot might have been feasible because it would have stayed a hardware business.

But AI labs are datacenter businesses now with the AI part being the driver. Pivoting to selling AI weights for on-premises hardware is a much bigger change. Given the money tied up in data centers, this will be very tough times.

[–] OccamsMirror 2 days ago
> LLMs comparable to today's state of the art are going to be running on $1-2K machines in a few years

This is a huge claim. What makes you think this will be the case?

[–] timschmidt 2 days ago
Qwen 3.8 27B, not even the superior Flash Next 125B, running on a single 3090 in my workstation handily whoops ChatGPT 3.5 from just a couple years ago.

Seems like he's just drawing that line into the future. Which seems sensible enough.

[–] hedora 2 days ago
I'm drawing the line into the past. Back when Biden was president, a computer that currently runs Flash Next 125B well cost $1400.

But yeah, I assume that when the economy gets back to normal-ish, in 2024-equivalent dollars, we'll be at 500B-1T for < $2000. That'll be 3-4 Moore's Law doublings since computer prices were sane. 125B * 2 ^ 4 = 2T.