>I have an overwhelming feeling that what we're trying to do here is "Netflix over DialUp."
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
I totally agree with you... though the other day, I did think the same thing about the 8bit era of video games.
There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s.
We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth.
Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century.
The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years.
"Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.
Improvement of models may not continue to be exponential.
But models might be good enough, at this point it seems more like they need integration and context.
I could be wrong :)
I did some napkin math on this.
32x H100s cost 'retail' rental prices about $2/hr. I would hope that the big AI companies get it cheaper than this at their scale.
These 32 H100s can probably do something on the order of >40,000 tok/s on a frontier scale model (~700B params) with proper batching. Potentially a lot more (I'd love to know if someone has some thoughts on this).
So that's $64/hr or just under $50k/month.
40k tok/s is a lot of usage, at least for non-agentic use cases. There is no way you are losing money on paid chatgpt users at $20/month on these.
You'd still break even supporting ~200 Claude Code-esque agentic users who were using it at full tilt 40% of the day at $200/month.
Now - this doesn't include training costs or staff costs, but on a pure 'opex' basis I don't think inference is anywhere near as unprofitable as people make out.
That said, you could be right, considering Claude max's price is $100/mo... but I'm not sure where that is in terms of typical, or top 5% usage and the monthly allowance/usage.
I mean, for now. The population of the world is finite, and there's probably a finite number of uses of AI, so it's still probably ultimately logistic
I think the image, video, audio, world model, diffusion domains should be treated 100% separately from LLMs. They are not the same thing.
Image and video AI is nothing short of revolutionary. It's already having huge impact and it's disrupting every single business it touches.
I've spoken with hundreds of medium and large businesses about it. They're changing how they bill clients and budget projects. It's already here and real.
For example, a studio that does over ten million in revenue annually used to bill ~$300k for commercial spots. Pharmaceutical, P&G, etc. Or HBO title sequences. They're now bidding ~$50k and winning almost everything they bid on. They're taking ten times the workload.
IME the volume is overwhelming on the pro-LLM side.
I don't think the ones saying it wont change a thing are the most extreme here.
iterative. we had a shittier version of this 20 years ago
The self-hostable models are improving rapidly. How capable and accessible WAN 2.2 (text+image to video; fully local if you have the VRAM) is feels unimaginable from last year when OpenAI released Sora (closed/hosted).
The issue is the way the market is investing they are looking for massive growth, in the multiples.
That growth can't really come from trading cost. It has to come from creating new demand for new things.
I think that's what not happened yet.
Are diffusion models increasing the demand for video and image content? Is it having customers spend more on shows, games, and so on? Is it going to lead to the creation of a whole new consumption medium ?
Good question? Is that necessary, or is it sufficient for AI to be integrated in every kind of CAD/design software out there?
Because I think most productivity tools whether CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc will benefit from AI. That's a huge market.
The market of the AI foundation models itself, will they have customers long term willing to pay a lot of money for access to the models?
I think yes, there will be demand for foundational AI models, and a lot of it.
The second market is the market of CAD, EDA, Office, graphic 2d/3d design, etc. This market will not grow because they integrate AI into their products, or that is the question, will it? Otherwise, you could almost hypothesize these market will shrink as AI is going to be for them an additional cost of business that customers will expect to be included. Or maybe they manage to sell to their customers a premium for the AI features where they take a cut above that of what they pay the foundational models under the hood, that's a possibility.
https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/chroniques/2025-07-08/polemique...
Typical large team $300,000 ad made for < $2,000 in a weekend by one person.
It's going to be a bloodbath.
Websites are already finding creative ways around DNS blocklists for ads serving.
So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!
How about harvesting your whale blubber to power your oil lamp at night?
The nature of work changes all the time.
If an ad can be made with one person, that's it. We're done. There's no going back to hiring teams of 50 people.
It's stupid to say we must hire teams of 50 to make an advertisement just because. There's no reason for that. It's busy work. The job is to make the ad, not to give 50 people meaningless busy work.
And you know what? The economy is going to grow to accommodate this. Every single business is now going to need animated ads. The market for video is going to grow larger than we've ever before imagined, and in ways we still haven't predicted.
Your local plumber is going to want a funny action movie trailer slash plumbing advertisement to advertise their services. They wouldn't have even been in the market before.
You're going to have silly videos for corporate functions. Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis. Whatever. There'll be a market for everything, and 100,000 times as many creators with actual autonomy.
In some number of years, there is going to be so much more content being produced. More content in single months than in all human history up to this point. Content that caters to the very long tail.
And you know what that means?
Jobs out the wazoo.
More jobs than ever before.
They're just going to look different and people will be doing more.
And why would your local plumber hire someone to produce this funny action trailer (which I'm not convinced would actually help them from an advertising perspective), when they can simply have an AI produce that action funny action trailer without hiring anyone? Assuming models improve sufficiently that will become trivially possible.
> Independent filmmakers will be making their own Miyazaki and Spielberg epics that cater to the most niche of audiences - no more mass market Marvel that has to satisfy everybody, you're going to see fictional fantasy biopic reimaginings of Grace Hopper fighting the vampire Nazis.
Well, first of all, if the audience is "the most niche of audiences", then I'm not sure how that's going to lead to a sustainable career. And again -- if I want to see my niche historical fantasy interests come to life in a movie about Grace Hopper fighting vampire Nazis, why will I need a filmmaker to create this for me when I can simply prompt an AI myself? "Give me a fun action movie that incorporates famous computer scientists fighting Nazis. Make it 1.5 hours long, and give it a comedic tone."
I think you're fundamentally overvaluing what humans will be able to provide in an era where creating content is very cheap and very easy.
This is very much real and happening as we speak.
It’s the equivalent of those cheap digital effects. They look bad for a Hollywood movie, but it allows students to shot their action home movies
The value is in having a director, editor, VFX compositor pick and choose from amongst the outputs. Each generation is a single take or simulation, and you're going to do hundreds or thousands. You sift through that and explore the latent space, and that's where you find your 5-person Pixar.
Human curated AI is an exoskeleton that enables small teams to replace huge studios.
Anything by sketch comedian Carter Jay Allen:
https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialArtCraftStudios/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY - Marvel parody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U - DC parody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4 - here's him compositing real life actors with AI.
"Bots in the Hall", a fairly prolific Hollywood film and TV writer who wants to remain unnamed:
https://www.youtube.com/@BotsInTheHall/videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAQWRBCt_5E - "Paywall Sphinx" is pretty good.
"Meta Puppet", who works for one of the big AI studios,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPcpWvAEt0 - "Plastic" doesn't look great, but it keeps getting crazier as you watch it
Some of the festival winners purposely stay away from talking since AI voices and lipsync are terrible, eg. "Poof" by the infamous "Pizza Later" (who is responsible for "Pepperoni Hug Spot") :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_SgA6ymPuc
"Talk Boys", who only posts on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/user/talkboys/
https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1ime5m8/birdwatche...
Marcos Higueras, an animator fully embracing AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCZC6XmEmK0
Most of the professional AI usage is still winding up in commercial use cases where you don't even know it's been used at all.
Can you elaborate? That sounds interesting.