$4,000 isn't priced insanely? ye gads
Sure, $4000 can be a lot of if you're a casual hobbyist or are struggle to meet everyday lifestyle costs, but it's definitely not "insane" if this is the trade you make your living from or if you've established a lifestyle that affords disposable income for your hobbies.
And for some people, $4000 for a device you have complete control over and can repurpose and tinker with to your own needs and curiosities is a much much more justifiable expense than a $200/mo rental for some narrow-access tool that somebody else controls.
The other reason is that it would likely take years to spend $4000 (plus the real cost of electricity) worth of tokens on a 3rd-party provider that's running a similar limited, DS Flash type model. By that time, the hardware will be obsolete, assuming it's still operational.
Since that cluster only yields 20-30 tok/s on that size of model, at least a decade before the hardware breaks-even with current token costs, and that's not counting electricity. Assuming continued downward pressure on token prices, and the cost of electricity, it never pays for itself.
Of course, it's not real unless I sell, and the value will eventually go down, but so far I have significant paper profits.
Also, DeepSeek token prices are continuing to _increase_, not decrease.
One increase does not a trend make. And the current crop of models are now undercutting deepseek flash...
Absolutely I do. Each generation of open-weight models has come with significant efficiency improvements, and there are significant hardware gains on the horizon: both increasing competition from Chinese chip manufacturers, and new custom silicon from the established players. And unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, most of the pure inference providers aren't massively leveraged - the more hardware they can bring online, the cheaper they can serve tokens.
Plus you're spec'd out of near-SOTA level in months.
The only reasons to actually do this are a) you have a lot of dispensable income and are a hobbyist/tinkerer, b) you have real, legitimate privacy concerns or, relatedly, c) you're doing something you don't want to get flagged
Even if you trained your own model, you'd be committing some of the same sins, paying for the same hardware that drove it, etc. But if you're using some open model, you're standing on the shoulders of the same corrupt giants.
I feel like when people say this is due to moral reasons, it's to justify an expensive hobby.
I also differentiate using their tech and paying them money. I don't think using their models, or perhaps using models derived from them as inherently evil. I just do not want to actually contribute to their bottom line in any way. Even if that means a slower ramp up of AI in general. In my opinion we could move slower.
I understand Nvidia is working with the labs to assist them to buy more hardware through financing and other deals. But ultimately I do not view that as the same as contributing directly to their P&L.
Ding!
Exactly; its a development box for fiddling with GPU hardware with a large amount of video-addressable memory. It's not an inference box, really, though it's neat that I can at all!
That's just a one-dimensional thought! Your own hardware gives you complete control, and it doesn't time you out for 4 hours, unlike those vendors.
Before getting the spark, I was just using a google colab account, their $49 dollar plan allows you access to h100's and I can run qwen there in a Jupyter notebook... and if I really need that web front end I can just use cloudeflair/tailscale/the local ssh client to reverse tunnel it.
This rent in the era of expensive hardware thing is not exclusive to inference.
I’ve needed x86 architecture for windows builds recently and have just hemmed and hawed over buying a decent windows 11 box.
I can’t make the math work against Azure instances.
I can spin up a nice one for build deallocate,spin up something cheaper for QA and then turn that off.
I can build all the devops around that, with a number of passes, with a skills based interface so working with the cloud is not too bad.
The only thing that still has me thinking about it is the prospect of price is going up even more, which is acid as far as I know.
And I’m hopefully going to need this x86 stuff enough that I don’t wanna wish I had gotten one for that high prices now.
Notice all the comments saying like "omg why so expensive so just use the API??". It's a trick for lockin even with, so called, "open" models. Keep trying to run them locally, keep undoing the lobotomies, mod model behavior so that they work for you and do what you want vs only what someone else says they're allowed to do.
I do set up my initial runs and likes like quantisation-aware-distillation on my Spark-like to test it out and get it working, so it has value! But its not "worth" it other than its fun hardware to tinker with, IMO.
Or just rent something substantial for like $4/hr on runpod or w/e to do that.
My gripe is this persons compute is wasteful and makes it harder for me to buy something with like 64gb ram to do normal work and run containers while I keep using cloud models.
Someone else calculated the break even being 10 years, it’s just dumb. And I think it’s clear there won’t be a big rug pull anymore, there are too many open models and providers now.
This is of course anecdata. I know plenty of outliers, too. I know a principal engineer who uses many multiples of the number I quoted above. I am sure we also know many people making do with much much smaller budgets as well, via all kinds of well-discussed methods.
But, "$500-$1500 per month per full-time developer" is just kind of the personal mental baseline I use when making my decisions with regards to thinking about whether any of this makes any economic sense.
1. You learn a lot more running this stuff yourself (especially since you can poke at its internals if you're interested or watch the reasoning chain.) Just being a consumer of this stuff doesn't really teach you much about it other than model & harness specific tricks that become obsolete pretty quickly. (IE, your Claude.md from 6 months ago probably needs a rewrite). Which is fine, I don't think you're going to be "left behind" if you're not a hardcore AI enthusiast or anything (I'm not), but as a guy that's always been interested in computer science I want to see how it ticks.
2. You can't really depend on this subsidization lasting forever IMO. I know the financials thing has been beaten to death but I guess I'm in the camp that it's good to be in control of your tools so that you can go elsewhere if the economics change.
I like to check in with ccusage pretty frequently, and honestly like if I were paying API prices for Claude I'd probably be paying thousands a month.
Any organisation or individuals not wanting to have their sensitive data flowing away (either because of trade secret or data protection laws)
There’s no law or business advantage preventing me giving my financial transaction and medical info to Google/Anthropic/OpenAI but I just don’t want to.
Actual net work doable with/intelligence supplied by the [TOKEN-SERF PACKAGE]: Unknown. Fluctuating.-
I picked up an older Dacia Sandero for cheap a few years back - it's the best money I've ever spent on a car, hands down. That car does not quit.
The Sparks admittedly are kind of anemic: 273GB/sec is the same bandwidth as a midrange 4060, although (depending on how you configure things) you can effectively have much greater bandwidth by connecting them.
Compared to 1-2 years worth of LLM tokens for a full-time software engineer making $100K+/year, a one-time spend of $12K for 4 Sparks for on-prem private LLM inference starts looking reasonable, particularly if privacy is an important consideration. It starts looking even more reasonable if running something like a private cloud to service multiple developers because then you likely need less hardware per developer.
(Also, it is going to be a long time until RAM+GPU prices return to what we used to call "normal." If ever. I am not endorsing the current state of affairs and I am not saying you wrong to find it insane, but it is definitely the new reality)
Checked a couple days ago and looks like we're at about 3.5x 2020 memory prices (looking at just $/GB).
For comparison the cheapest Strix Halo 128GB went from 1600€ to 2600€ in the same timeframe.
It depends.
My bicycle was in the 5-digits brand new (now I paid it 1/5th of that and I do thank the first owner for that: the 8 000 out of 10 K I saved were put into stocks, that's his opportunity cost, not mine).
Or I know a great many a going to cry "audiofool", but I can say with certainty the following does sound better than the stereo setup of those crying audiofool:
(not my setup but I've got those speakers: same thing, 15 K EUR brand new for the pair... Previous owner forked the money to buy these brand new and, well, I didn't... And I just hooked them to a wonderful, cheap, fully-integrated Yamaha amp: amazing sound).
If your hobby is DIY job around the house, the cost of tools can very quickly add up too: having 20 K worth of tools is definitely not unthinkable.
You like old cars? Pricey hobby.
Some here even track their cars: tires and brake pads budget (and overall car budget and depreciation)... Through the roof.
There's a saying that you're not really into computers if your setup doesn't cost more than your car.
Is $16 K ($4 K x 4) a lot? It's six months of rent for me and for many here I'm sure. It's not "crazy crazy".
Can anyone afford that? Definitely not. But there are way more insane things out there.
And thanks to the individuals that go through to all the pain of setting those up, we've got feedback, tutorials, explanation, numbers, etc. as to how to run those at home.
For example I helped my brother set up VMs and GPU passthrough and he's now running uncensored models locally and showing me the different answers between the uncensored models and the commercial, censored, ones.
So to GP who bought four of these: we need more people like you on HN, keep it going, blog about it, be "crazy"!
Edit: Yeah I see an ONTi QSFP56 on Amazon for $45, 10Gtek QSFP112 for $62
Reality is on a single spark I'm constantly running out of room and it being an odd size M.2 slot it's a pain to upgrade. I'm setting up a NAS over RDMA via ConnectX though, that's fun.