I've said too much already!
541 karma · joined January 11, 2022
I've said too much already!
Person 2: [gives examples]
Person 1: oh ho! But those people are not in academia any more! They're not "practicing scientists"!
Person 2: ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProductManagement/comments/uy1ot1/w...
Where I would expect to see people invest in local models is in cases where a company has regulatory requirements to keep data local, or where they're doing some specialized kind of work. Neither of those really apply to Uber. In 2026, it would absolutely be irresponsible for a taxi company to try to build a better Claude than Claude.
Now what this looks like 5 or 10 years from now, it's hard to say. A lot will depend on whether China keeps releasing open weight models and whether people can still run those open weight models on commercially available hardware.
While I hope local AI continues to exist, I'm skeptical that it will take over, for the same reason running your own servers hasn't taken over. It's just hard, and involves spending huge sums of money up front.
It's also not really clear how much tokens are being subsidized. The discussion reminds me of Uber. For years people on HN claimed that Uber was going to collapse once they ran out of VC money. Then... that never happened, and everyone just moved on to discussing other things.
Another issue is that there are cultural barriers. People in India or elsewhere may say "yes" when they really mean "hmm, probably not" because saying no to a superior could be considered rude.
If you replace a big team with a small team and LLMs, you are actually saving money overall because LLMs are much cheaper than humans. But you may actually need more skilled humans than previously, not less skilled ones, because they need to be able to manage a large volume of code being generated. LLMs are not good news for outsourced developers. They are the opposite: a cheaper substitute for the grunt work that they had been providing.
So there's a huge number of HN posters claiming that the price of tokens will go UP over time rather than down (that's how Moore's Law works, right???) or that code bases that AI contributes to will spontaneously combust, or something.