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LLM Inevitabilism

(tomrenner.com)
1616 points SwoopsFromAbove | 8 comments | 15 Jul 25 04:35 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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delichon ◴[15 Jul 25 04:49 UTC] No.44567913[source]▶
If in 2009 you claimed that the dominance of the smartphone was inevitable, it would have been because you were using one and understood its power, not because you were reframing away our free choice for some agenda. In 2025 I don't think you can really be taking advantage of AI to do real work and still see its mass adaptation as evitable. It's coming faster and harder than any tech in history. As scary as that is we can't wish it away.
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NBJack ◴[15 Jul 25 05:00 UTC] No.44567951[source]▶
Ironically, this is exactly the technique for arguing that the blog mentions.

Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

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HPsquared ◴[15 Jul 25 05:03 UTC] No.44567966[source]▶
1. The Segway had very low market penetration but a lot of PR. LLMs and diffusion models have had massive organic growth.

2. Segways were just ahead of their time: portable lithium-ion powered urban personal transportation is getting pretty big now.

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jdiff ◴[15 Jul 25 05:24 UTC] No.44568065[source]▶
Massive, organic, and unprofitable. And as soon as it's no longer free, as soon as the VC funding can no longer sustain it, an enormous fraction of usage and users will all evaporate.

The Segway always had a high barrier to entry. Currently for ChatGPT you don't even need an account, and everyone already has a Google account.

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etaioinshrdlu ◴[15 Jul 25 05:33 UTC] No.44568113[source]▶
This is wrong because LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone (search style or banner ad style) for over 2 years now. And they are getting cheaper over time for the same quality.

It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API!

Zero chance all the users evaporate unless something much better comes along, or the tech is banned, etc...

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scubbo ◴[15 Jul 25 05:41 UTC] No.44568161[source]▶
> LLMs are cheap enough to run profitably on ads alone

> It is even cheaper to serve an LLM answer than call a web search API

These, uhhhh, these are some rather extraordinary claims. Got some extraordinary evidence to go along with them?

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1. etaioinshrdlu ◴[15 Jul 25 06:33 UTC] No.44568437[source]▶
I've operated a top ~20 LLM service for over 2 years, very comfortably profitably with ads. As for the pure costs you can measure the cost of getting an LLM answer from say, OpenAI, and the equivalent search query from Bing/Google/Exa will cost over 10x more...
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2. clarinificator ◴[15 Jul 25 07:06 UTC] No.44568690[source]▶
Profitably covering R&D or profitably using the subsidized models?
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3. johnecheck ◴[15 Jul 25 12:08 UTC] No.44570293[source]▶
So you don't have any real info on the costs. The question is what OpenAI's profit margin is here, not yours. The theory is that these costs are subsidized by a flow of money from VCs and big tech as they race.

How cheap is inference, really? What about 'thinking' inference? What are the prices going to be once growth starts to slow and investors start demanding returns on their billions?

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4. jsnell ◴[15 Jul 25 13:24 UTC] No.44570890[source]▶
Every indication we have is that pay-per-token APIs are not subsidized or even break-even, but have very high margins. The market dynamics are such that subsidizing those APIs wouldn't make much sense.

The unprofitability of the frontier labs is mostly due to them not monetizing the majority of their consumer traffic at all.

5. throwawayoldie ◴[15 Jul 25 14:24 UTC] No.44571469[source]▶
So you're not running an LLM, you're running a service built on top of a subsidized API.
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6. etaioinshrdlu ◴[15 Jul 25 16:52 UTC] No.44573233[source]▶
It would be profitable even if we self-hosted the LLMs, which we've done. The only thing subsidized is the training costs. So maybe people will one day stop training AI models.
7. ◴[15 Jul 25 18:06 UTC] No.44574117[source]▶
8. guappa ◴[16 Jul 25 08:20 UTC] No.44579917[source]▶
He was doing neither. He was using a 3rd party API and has no idea what it costs them to actually run it.