If you had a business task to complete that was only possible with ai and it cost you >$1500/month of work, how long would you have to delay the task so that it's cheaper long run to buy hardware and do local models?
reply$1,500/mo * 14 months = $21,000.
If local models are 14mo behind as many in HN say it may be profitable to just wait. Maybe just spend a few hundred dollars of your tokens and buy hardware piece by piece.
Nearly no one is doing anything that is “only possible with AI”. This doesn’t seem like a relevant calculation. People spend on AI as an investment in their current productivity.
replyThere's a lot of opportunity cost to waiting 14 months to build something.
replyI agree, outside of the AI bubble, there's a lot of wait-and-see happening in the B2B world right now, I'd say we're currently 6-8 months into that 14 months.
replyIt also presupposes that open models will bridge that gap towards opus4.5, which was really when I drank the AI coding koolaid
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