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!