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Google AI Ultra

(blog.google)
320 points mfiguiere | 9 comments | 20 May 25 18:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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kleiba ◴[20 May 25 19:30 UTC] No.44045033[source]▶
These prices are nuts, in my opinion. It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings - this used to be the case for specialist software in the past (e.g., in the medical sector), but AI has the potential to be useful for anyone.

Not a good development.

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1. esafak ◴[20 May 25 19:32 UTC] No.44045045[source]▶
And I think it is a good thing. If there are buyers, it means they are getting that much value out of it. That there is a market for it. Competition will bring prices down.
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2. mschuster91 ◴[20 May 25 19:34 UTC] No.44045078[source]▶
> Competition will do its thing and bring prices down.

It won't. For now the AI "market" is artificially distorted by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies dumping insane amount of cash into NVDA, but when the money spigot dries out (which it inevitably will) prices are going to skyrocket and stay there for a loooong time.

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3. esafak ◴[20 May 25 19:37 UTC] No.44045111[source]▶
How will prices skyrocket when there is a flood of open models? Or are you talking about GPU prices? They're already high.
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4. jsheard ◴[20 May 25 19:46 UTC] No.44045185{3}[source]▶
Who do you think is paying to train those open models? The notable ones are all released by VC-funded startups or gigacorps which are losing staggering amounts of money to make each new release happen. If nobody is making a profit from closed models then what hope do the companies releasing open models have when the money spigot runs dry?

The open models which have already been released can't be taken back now of course, but it would be foolish to assume that SOTA freebies will keep coming forever.

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5. msikora ◴[20 May 25 20:10 UTC] No.44045413[source]▶
ChatGPT is insanely subsidized. The $20/month sub is such a great value. Just the image gen is about $0.25 a pop through the API. That's 80 image generations for $20.
6. johnisgood ◴[20 May 25 20:18 UTC] No.44045489{3}[source]▶
I do not think I will ever be able to afford hardware that is capable of running local LLMs. :(

What I can afford right now is literally the ~20 EUR / month claude.ai pro subscription, and it works quite well for me.

7. conductr ◴[20 May 25 20:22 UTC] No.44045526{4}[source]▶
It won't be the end of the world if the 'progress' were to slow down a little, I have trouble keeping up with what's available as it is - much less tinkering with it all
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8. mschuster91 ◴[20 May 25 20:45 UTC] No.44045737{3}[source]▶
> How will prices skyrocket when there is a flood of open models?

Easy: once the money spigot runs out and/or a proprietary model has a quality/featureset that other open-weight models can't match, it's game over. The open-weight models cost probably dozens of millions of dollars to train, this is not sustainable.

And that's just training cost - inference costs are also massively subsidized by the money spigot, so the price for end users will go up from that alone as well.

9. delusional ◴[20 May 25 21:27 UTC] No.44046091{5}[source]▶
It will because "keeping up" is the sleight of hand. By constantly tweaking the model you don't ever notice anything it's consistently wrong about. If they "slowed progress" you'd notice.

Current AI is Fast Fashion for computer people.