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Comment by alanfranz | Hacker News Reader

… IF chinese models stay open.

Chinese models don't need to stay open. The open weight ones just need to have nearly the same capabilities as the models sold by US companies. When that's the case, no one will have a reason to continue paying anything to any US company, thus destroying their business model and business case.

Idk about the destroying their business model part. Running your models on your own is akin to running a media server, which most people seem to be fine paying $20/m for someone else to do.

AI companies can’t sustain this bleeding of runway. Eventually they’re all going to have to significantly bump up pricing. I guarantee personal accounts will be between double and triple your current internet and phone plan combined

People have been saying this for three years. When will it happen?

That is not going to convince people to self-host models. The AI companies effectively have infinite money. Even if they did somehow run out, the US government would bail them out just like they did the car manufacturers.

Well, maybe if your own media server only showed videos in 1fps compared to hosted ones. You’re not comparing apples to apples here. You might argue that local inference speeds are acceptable, but that doesn’t make them comparably equivalent.

What? Local inference is slow so people will want to self-host? I don't understand your argument.

In fact they can be clearly worse, so long as they are same ballpark for many use cases.

I.e. I would pay 15-20% more for comparable work from an open model I control,rather than use anthro et al.

And it seems we've gotten to the point that frontier models benefits are marginal/nominal. Whereas, not long ago Claude was materially ahead and could do things the other models simply couldn't.

... IF the world doesn't end tomorrow.

Yes, of course, IF a lot of things. But if we go by what the official positions of the government is, and where the ecosystem is today, then the models stay open, as they are. And today, the US models stay closed, so lets not assume "... IF they stay closed" as nothing is pointing to this changing, just like China seems to point towards staying with open models.

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