I think you have gone in the end of the spectrum, in a sense that even a state law's are being broken, we are talking about rules in the market itself.
I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.
Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.
I like to imagine the reference in the movie margin call is that of a merry go round or a game of Musical chair. Like we are all on a ride, none of us are the operator, and all we can do is guess when the music will stop (and the ride ends).
The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuff will be useful. The reasons for the high valuation is, in my guess, that there is more value here than what we have tapped so far, right?
The revenues that nVidia has reported is based on what we hope we will achieve in the future so I guess the whole thing is speculation?
TBF, all financial market is speculation these days, what only change is the figure/percentage of how much a share is actually the value it's priced.
> The problem with this AI stuff is we don't know how much we will be willing to pay for it, as individuals, as businesses, as nations. I guess we just don't know how far this stuff will be useful. The reasons for the high valuation is, in my guess, that there is more value here than what we have tapped so far, right?
I think the value now comes on how we make a product of it, for example, like OpenClaw. Whether we like or not, AI is really expensive to train, not only in monetary value but also in resources, and the gains have been diminishing with each “generation”. Let's not forget we heard promises that have not been fulfilled, for example AGI or “AI could potentially cure cancer, with enough power”.
And if you've been watching Deepmind AI has been making advances in medical sciences at a pretty damned fast rate. So not fulfilled is a pretty weak statement. The pipeline in medical is very long.
And that's not even talking about the head spinning rate robotics is advancing. The hardware we use for LLMs is also being used in robot simulation for hardware training that gives results in hours that took weeks or months in the past.
> There are some pretty revealing comments here. People seem to think only money has value.
To be fair, the majority has been conditioned in thinking that only money should be your purpose, that's literally how capitalism works, even arts now is a product that need to be sold to the highest bidder, or manufactured in the millions to be sold.
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