Maybe, but what is the shelf-life of that 18 month decision? Barely good enough today, when it launches, starts to get worse and worse every month going forward. You have to recuperate that investment on your depreciating asset.
And you are competing against anyone with the foresight to use a TPU instead, and the benefit from any new paper that finds how to distill, quantize or whatever better so their solution gets algorithmic boosts while you are locked in.
One could also imagine hybrid models, where part of the model is burned into ASICs and part of the model exists in VRAM/HBM2 so it can be updated.
I don't have enough low-level knowledge to evaluate the technical or economic feasibility of the above ideas, however.
Sometimes you need speed; sometimes you need quality. There are very different use cases for each. For my own workflows, I sometimes want something very simple done ASAP; other workflows need "subjective" reasoning and careful crafting of responses.
A model will often come up with worse results given more cycles of compute, only because it will tailspin from second guesses, rethinking and literal flip-flopping on concepts.
--- edit: to those following the thread below... if you look at the comments from the account replying, it's pretty obviously a pro-China account and all replies are antagonistic against anything other than a total submission to the Chinese state. My responses are intentionally antagonistic as every point I've brought up is completely ignored in favor of insults, so yeah, I've been insulting back.
If you let a model spin too much, you get worse results... that's a fact, even for the best models. Nothing you've stated since actually refutes that and acting like a paid bot doesn't mean anything.
I mean, if you want to felate Xi Jinping, have at it... that's all on you bro. I don't have a horse in this race.
You're just an idiot who assumes everyone that doesn't agree with you is the same. I'm surprised you're able to reply with Xi's penis in your mouth... even if it is kind of spacious in there for his limited size. How is the poo bear these days? Does he like it when you gargle his testicles in your mouth?