I think they were referring to the costs of training and hosting the models. You're counting the cost of what you're buying, but the people selling it to you are in the red.
wrong. OpenAI is literally the only AI company with horrific financials. You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
OpenAI may be the worst, but I am pretty sure Anthropic is still bleeding money on AI, and I would expect a bunch of smaller dedicated AI firms are too; Google is the main firm with competitive commercial models at the high end across multiple domains that is funding AI efforts largely from its own operations (and even there, AI isn’t self sufficient, its just an internal rather than an external subsidy.)
Dario has said many times over that each model is profitable if viewed as a product that had development costs and operational costs just like any other product from any other business ever.
What that means, and whether it means much of anything at all depends on the assumed “useful life” of the model used to set the amortization period assumed for the development costs.
> You think google is actually bleeding money on AI? they are funding it all with cash flow and still have monster margins.
They can still be "bleeding money on AI" if they're making enough in other areas to make up for the loss.
The question is: "Are LLMs profitable to train and host?" OpenAI, being a pure LLM company, will go bankrupt if the answer is no. The equivalent for Google is to cut its losses and discontinue the product. Maybe Gemini will have the same fate as Google+.
In my experience owning private stock, you basically own part of a pool. (Hopefully the exact same classes of shares as the board has or else it's a scam.) The board controls the pool, and whenever they do dividends or transfer ownership, each person's share is affected proportionally. You can petition the board to buy back your shares or transfer them to another shareholder but that's probably unusual for a rank-and-file employee.
The shares are valued by an accounting firm auditor of some type. This determines the basis value if you're paying taxes up-front. After that the tax situation should be the same as getting publicly traded options/shares, there's some choices in how you want to handle the taxes but generally you file a special tax form at the year of grant.
Postgres nationalists will applaud the conclusion no matter how bad the reasoning is.
Don't get me wrong, the idea that he wants to just use a RDMBS because his needs aren't great enough, is a perfectly inoffensive conclusion. The path that led him there is very unpersuasive.
It's also dangerous. Ultimately the author is willing to do a bit more work rather than learn something new. This works because he's using a popular tool people like. But overall, he doesn't demonstrate he's even thought about any of the things I'd consider most important; he just sort of assumes running a Redis is going to be hard and he'd rather not mess with it.
To me, the real question is just cost vs. how much load the DB can even take. My most important Redis cluster basically exists to take load off the DB, which takes high load even by simple queries. Using the DB as a cache only works if your issue is expensive queries.
I think there's an appeal that this guy reaches the conclusion someone wants to hear, and it's not an unreasonable conclusion, but it creates the illusion the reasoning he used to get there was solid.
I mean, if you take the same logic, cross out the word Postgres, and write in "Elasticsearch," and now it's an article about a guy who wants to cache in Elasticsearch because it's good enough, and he uses the exact same arguments about how he'll just write some jobs to handle expiry--is this still sounding like solid, reasonable logic? No it's crazy.
That's how I've always characterized them. But if you think about it, it's not really true.
The LLM is "lossily" containing things an encyclopedia would never contain. An encyclopedia, no matter how large, would never contain the entire text of every textbook it deems worth of inclusion. It would always contain a summary and/or discussion of the contents. The LLM does, though it "compresses" over it, so that it, too, only has the gist at whatever granularity it's big enough to contain.
So in that sense, an encyclopedia is also a lossy encyclopedia.
the quality is definitely not better, not since the early 2000s when everything was fully digital and everything is single tracked, rhythm shifted to metronome grid, autotuned--the really big budget producers like max martin will put a little effort into the mixdown but by and large they're not even trying to make thing sound good, they're just pumping out minimal effort productions with default settings.
Second guy says he's had a bad philosophy class, implying it's a bad, naive, amateur, or uninformed take on the philosophical subject at hand.
First guy says he's had many, implying he's actually studied philosophy extensively, perhaps majored in it in college or obtained a degree, refuting the idea that the original take was amateur or uninformed.
The LLMs do have "latent knowledge," indisputably, the latent knowledge is beyond reproach. Because what we do know about the "black box" is that inside it, is a database of not just facts, but understanding, and we know the model "understands" nearly every topic better than any human. Where the doubt-worthy part happens is the generative step, since it is tasked with producing a new "understanding" that didn't already exist, the mathematical domain of the generative function exceeds the domain of reality. And, second of all, because the reasoning faculties are far less proven than the understanding faculties, and many queries require reasoning about existing understandings to derive a good, new one.
*or any digitized proprietary works, just as long as they can be parsed correctly. don't worry, the means of how to optain these works doesn't seem to matter[0]
I claim it's normal to hate public transport. Online, there are some loudmouthed public transport enthusiasts. To them, everyone who isn't doing public transport is a racist, boomer, redneck, luddite, and whatever aspersion you've got.
The real reason America has so many cars is people like cars better, and America developed in a time where people were rich enough to make it happen. People don't like public transport. I asked someone who grew up in another country, in a huge city with only public transport--and reputedly good, clean public transport at that--what they think of public transport, and they said it's gross and for poor people. (It wasn't a code for racism, their country was ethnically monotone.)
People like that don't visit threads like this though. You just get this echo chamber of young, childless, cosmopolitans who only care about a certain kind of efficiency in transport.
