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Comment by neepi | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I completely agree with this.

My objection to the whole thing is the AI hype bros, which is really the funding solicitation facade over everything rather the truth, only has one outcome and that is that it cannot be sustained. At that point all investor confidence disappears, the money is gone and everyone loses access to the tools that they suddenly built all their dependencies on because it's all proprietary service model based.

Which is why I am not poking it with a 10 foot long shitty stick any time in the near future. The failure mode scares me, not the technology which arguably does have some use in non-idiot hands.

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A lot of the best internet services came around in the decade after the dot-com crash. There is a chance Anthropic or OpenAI may not survive when funding suddenly dries up, but existing open weight models won't be majorly impacted. There will always be someone willing to host DeepSeek for you if you're willing to pay.

And while it will be sad to see model improvements slow down when the bubble bursts there is a lot of untapped potential in the models we already have. Especially as they become cheaper and easier to run

Someone might host DeepSeek for you but you'll pay through the nose for it and it'll be frozen in time because the training cost doesn't have the revenue to keep the ball rolling.

I'm not sure the GPU market won't collapse with it either. Possibly taking out a chunk of TSMC in the process, which will then have knock on effects across the whole industry.

There are already inference providers like DeepInfra or inference.net whose entire business model is hosted inference of open-source models. They promise not to keep or use any of the data and their business model has no scaling effects, so I assume they are already charging a fair market rate where the price covers the costs and returns a profit.

The GPU market will probably take a hit. But the flip side of that is that the market will be flooded with second-hand enterprise-grade GPUs. And if Nvidia needs sales from consumer GPUs again we might see more attractive prices and configurations there too. In the short term a market shock might be great for hobby-scale inference, and maybe even training (at the 7B scale). In the long term it will hurt, but if all else fails we still have AMD who are somehow barely invested in this AI boom

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