I wonder how long it will take the software industry to re-learn the 2010s lesson, that basing your entire business on (and in this case, firing half of your employees and replacing them with) another company’s API is a bad business decision
downtime is always going to 'scale' poorly against loads that require a lot of hardware thrown at them, even with lots of good fail-over -- probably worse for the small vendors because they don't have the contracts supplying them with hardware first so availability is already at a premium for them.
so, I guess i'm saying yeah I hope frontier-level-models get out soon in the open arenas, but I suspect the same or similar level of exclusivity will exist as long as they take that much compute to operate.
Which doesn't mean the open models will definitely succeed, it just means they have more of a shot than the open social networks ever did
I don't know about that. More usage means more support, which means more docs and open source projects, wrappers, harnesses built around them etc.
Way less demand to build tooling around open weight models if they remain hobbyist.
1. Using AI helps as part of the training process.
2. All the prompts going to openai/claude is a gold mine.
> On the infrastructure side: OpenAI signed non-binding letters of intent with Samsung and SK Hynix for up to 900,000 DRAM wafers per month, roughly 40% of global output. These were of course non-binding. Micron, reading the demand signal, shut down its 29-year-old Crucial consumer memory brand to redirect all capacity toward AI customers. Then Stargate Texas was cancelled, OpenAI and Oracle couldn’t agree terms, and the demand that had justified Micron’s entire strategic pivot simply vanished. Micron’s stock crashed.
[0] https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-how-the-ai-loser-ma...
There is no way to know whether it is a good or bad business decision just because they can go down when a third party goes down. For example, if you save $50 million a year by firing half your employees and replacing them with AI, but you lose $10 million a year because your site goes down when Claude goes down, then you made a great business decision.
I honestly don't care nearly as much as I used to, because I used to be more upset over this. Now, I simply wait to see how much is enough to rile up average Joe and Jenna.
Mostly I think its that management does not blame the person who picks AWS. Its another iteration of "no one got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft".
It is also an issue at other levels: if all a county's businesses rely on AWS (let alone its government) then that gives the US huge leverage over you (sanctions would shut down your economy).
Your system is down as often as AWS. When you are down your lost sales are shared between 10 of them. When AWS is down you get all their lost sales.
Obviously very simplified, but you get the point. There might be a huge gain in being up when others are down.
> Betting your business on AWS being flakier than whatever alternative provider you use is probably not a good idea.
You are not betting your business on it. You are betting the consequences of downtime only.
AWS does not seem to be all that high reliability out of the box. You can use multiple availability zones etc. but you can do the equivalent elsewhere.
Most of humanity doesn't think this, nor I doubt any devs like the current state of affairs where 4 companies dictate the direction of technology in this country.
“Web 2.0” was supposed to be a web of interoperable applications with features exposed by APIs, where you could assemble little pieces of functionality into new and novel configurations. It was cool for a little while, but it was never sustainable. There was an enclosure of the commons (they were never really the commons), and now we’re all digital serfs.
It was a beautiful dream, while it lasted!