Last year, I bought an Nvidia GPU for self-hosting AI tools. I'm not a gamer, and I would've never bought this thing if it weren't for AI. I simply don't want to rely on big tech for tools that I would share my personal information with. After spinning up some
I pay for it. One of the services I pay is about $25/mo and they release about one update a year or so. It’s not cutting edge, just specialized. And they are making a profit doing a bit of tech investment and running the service, apparently. But also they are just tuning and packaging a publicly available model, not creating their own.
What can’t be sustained is this sprint to AGI or to always stay at the head of the pack. It’s too much investment for tiny gains that ultimately don’t move the needle a lot. I guess if the companies all destroy one another until only one remains, or someone really does attain AGI, they will realize gains. I’m not sure I see that working out, though.
So they can be profitable because the cost of creating that model isn’t factored in, and if people stop throwing money at LLMs and stop releasing models for free, there goes their business model. So this is not really sustainable either.
The people releasing public models aren’t the ones doing this for profit. Mostly. I know OpenAI and DeepSeek both have. Guess I’ll have to go look up who trained GLM, but I suspect the resources will always be there to push the technology forward at a slower pace. People will learn to do more with less resources and that’s where the bulk of the gains will be made.
Edit: A Chinese university trained GLM. Which is the sort of place where I expect research will continue to be done.
A startup spun out by a university (z.ai). Their business model is similar to what everybody else does, they host their models and sell access while trying to undercut each other. And like others they raised billions in funding from investors to be able to do this.
The model is publicly available. You and I can run it — I do. People will continue to do research long after the bubble bursts. People will continue to make breakthroughs. The technology will continue forward, just at a slower, healthier pace once the money tightens up.
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