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Comment by alex43578 | Hacker News Reader

With OpenAI having released 20 and 120B models a while back, I think they recognized that tiny models were never going to be a defensible income stream.

Any value will come from the largest models, and those largest models are unlikely to ever run on consumer hardware within their window of relevancy.

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You're missing the point. You very rarely need the biggest and "best" model. This is psychology and nothing more, people always want the "best" and don't often consider "good enough".

Small models are good enough depending on your task. That's the point. A model you can run on your phone or laptop is an incredibly useful tool for a lot of problems even though it isn't the "best" theoretically possible model.

How often do you need the task to turn out harder than you anticipate and the small model unexpectedly failing to change the calculation?

You're missing the point: those small "good enough" models aren't monetizable and haven't been for months already. All of the value in LLMs is going to come from frontier models at a high cost to businesses/governments. It'll be the difference between next day air-mail of a contract and sticking a stamp on your christmas card to Grandma - nobody's making a profit on the christmas card.

I suspect in 5 years everyone will have the equivalent of a 512gb mac mini running a 500b class open weight model for 98% of their tasks, shelling out to openai/anthropic for the other 2%. People who need higher end models will own the equivalent of 4 x 512gb mac mini running a 2.8T class open weight model. I don't know where OpenAI and Anthropic are going to get their revenue from to keep developing SOTA frontier models at that point.

Yep.

And firms will be kept in check with financials.

If your competitor starts using chinese models and delivers better earnings whilst you are spending more on american ones... hahaaha. Wait and see what happens.

You will be FIRED!

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