Imagine how many millions would drive a Ferrari if they gave them away for free
0.
Ferrari is a luxury sports brand. What's the point of it if it flooded the streets?
How to say you don't own a Ferrari without saying you don't own a Ferrari.
It’s actually quite interesting to see these contradictory positions play out:
1. LLMs are useless and everyone is making a stupid bet on it. The users of llms are fooled into using it and the companies are fooled into betting on it
2. Llms are getting so cheap that the investments into data centers won’t pay off because apparently they will get good enough to run on your phone
3. Llms are bad and they are bad for environment, bad for the brain, bad because they displace workers and bad because they make rich people richer
4. AI is only kept up because there’s a conspiracy to keep it propped up by Nvidia, oracle, OpenAI (something something circular economy)
5. AI is so powerful that it should not be built or humanity would go extinct
B) You're missing a few things like:
1. The hardware overhang of edge compute (especially phones) may make the centralized compute investments irrelevant as more efficient LLMs (or whatever replaces them) are released.
2. Hardware depreciates quickly. Are these massive data centers really going to earn their money back before a more efficient architecture makes them obsolete? Look at all the NPUs on phones which are useless with most current LLMs due to insufficient RAM. Maybe analogue compute takes off, or giant FPGAs, which can do on a single board what is done with a rack at the moment. We are nowhere near a stable model architecture, or stable optimal compute architecture. Follow the trajectory of bitcoin and etherium mining here to see what we can expect.
3. How does one company earn back their R&D when the moment it is released, competition puts out comparable models within 6 months, possibly by using the very service that was provided to generate training data.