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> For all the desperate founders rushing to train their models to convince their investors for their next $100 million round. Has anyone actually trained a mod

> For all the desperate founders rushing to train their models to convince their investors for their next $100 million round. Has anyone actually trained a model actually worth all this money? Even OpenAI is s struggling to staunch the outflow of cash. Even if you can get a profitable model (for what?) how many billion dollar models does the world support? And everyone is throwing money into the pit and just hoping that there's no technical advance that obsoletes everything from under them, or commiditisation leading to a "good enough" competitor that does it cheaper. I mean, I get that everyone and/or they investors has got the FOMO for not being the guys holding the AGI demigod at the end of the day. But from a distance it mostly looks like a huge speculative cash bonfire.

jordwest 2y ago
> I get that everyone and/or they investors has got the FOMO for not being the guys holding the AGI demigod at the end of the day Don't underestimate the power of the ego... Look at their bonfire, we need one like that but bigger and hotter
- bugbuddy 2y ago
  I spit out my tea when I read your last sentence. You should consider standup comedy.
  - wyclif 2y ago
    It's a bonfire, turn the lights out
justahuman74 2y ago
> For all the desperate founders rushing to train their models to convince their investors for their next $100 million round. I would say Meta has (though not a startup) justified the expenditure. By freely releasing llama they undercut every a huge swath of competition who can get funded during the hype. Then when the hype dies they can pick up what the real size of the market is, with much better margins than if there were a competitive market. Watch as one day they stop releasing free versions and start rent seeking on N+1
- mlinhares 2y ago
  Given meta hasn’t been able to properly monetize WhatsApp I seriously doubt they can monetize this.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    Who says they haven't?
- grues-dinner 2y ago
  Right, but that is all predicated that, when they get to the end, having spent tons of nuclear fuel, container shiploads of GPUs and whole national GDPs on the project, there will be some juice worth all that squeeze. And even if AI as we know it today is still relevant and useful in that future, and the marginal value per training-dollar stays (becomes?) positive, will they be able to defend that position against lesser, cheaper, but more agile AIs? What will the position even be that Llama2030 or whatever will be worth that much? Like, I know that The Market says the expected payoff is there, but what is it?
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    As the article suggests, the presence of LLAMA is decreasing demand for GPUs. Which are critical to Metas ad recommendation services. Ironically, by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models, they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute. I suspect they’ll never directly monetize LLAMA as a public service.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      > Ironically, by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models, they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute. For other people that that sentence didn't make sense for at first glance: "by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models [to run on their own hardware] they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute [server supply]."
Aeolun 2y ago
Isn’t OpenAI profitable if they stop training right at this moment? Just because they’re immediately reinvesting all that cash doesn’t mean they’re not profitable.
- Attach6156 2y ago
  And if they stop training right now their "moat" (which I think is only o1 as of today) would last a good 3 to 6 months lol, and then to the Wendy's it is.
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    That is similarly true for all other AI companies. It’s why they don’t do that. But everyone is still happy to give them more money because their offering is good as it is.
  - wyclif 2y ago
    >and then to the Wendy's it is I didn't really catch that pop culture reference. What does that mean?
    - slater 2y ago
      My guess: The competition catches up, you lose all paying clients, and you get to apply for jobs at Wendy's...?
      - wyclif 2y ago
        Or does it mean it's a trivial decision, as trivial as deciding what fast food joint to choose?
        slater 2y ago
        Guess we'll never know :(
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
hackernewds 2y ago
Lots of companies have. Most recently Character AI trained an internal model and did raise $100M early last year. They didn't release any benchmarks since the founding team and Noam taken to Google
elcomet 2y ago
Not everyone is doing LLM training. I know plenty of startups selling AI products for various image tasks (agriculture, satellite, medical...)
- mark_l_watson 2y ago
  Yes, a lot of the money to be made is in the middleware and application sides of development. I find even small models like Llama 3.2 2B to be extremely useful and fine tuning and integration with existing businesses can have a large potential payoff for smaller investments.
tonetegeatinst 2y ago
Pretty sure anthropic has

jordwest 2y ago

> I get that everyone and/or they investors has got the FOMO for not being the guys holding the AGI demigod at the end of the day Don't underestimate the power of the ego... Look at their bonfire, we need one like that but bigger and hotter

bugbuddy 2y ago
I spit out my tea when I read your last sentence. You should consider standup comedy.
- wyclif 2y ago
  It's a bonfire, turn the lights out

justahuman74 2y ago

> For all the desperate founders rushing to train their models to convince their investors for their next $100 million round. I would say Meta has (though not a startup) justified the expenditure. By freely releasing llama they undercut every a huge swath of competition who can get funded during the hype. Then when the hype dies they can pick up what the real size of the market is, with much better margins than if there were a competitive market. Watch as one day they stop releasing free versions and start rent seeking on N+1

mlinhares 2y ago
Given meta hasn’t been able to properly monetize WhatsApp I seriously doubt they can monetize this.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Who says they haven't?
grues-dinner 2y ago
Right, but that is all predicated that, when they get to the end, having spent tons of nuclear fuel, container shiploads of GPUs and whole national GDPs on the project, there will be some juice worth all that squeeze. And even if AI as we know it today is still relevant and useful in that future, and the marginal value per training-dollar stays (becomes?) positive, will they be able to defend that position against lesser, cheaper, but more agile AIs? What will the position even be that Llama2030 or whatever will be worth that much? Like, I know that The Market says the expected payoff is there, but what is it?
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  As the article suggests, the presence of LLAMA is decreasing demand for GPUs. Which are critical to Metas ad recommendation services. Ironically, by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models, they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute. I suspect they’ll never directly monetize LLAMA as a public service.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    > Ironically, by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models, they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute. For other people that that sentence didn't make sense for at first glance: "by supporting the LLM community with free compute-intense models [to run on their own hardware] they’re decreasing demand (and price) for the compute [server supply]."

Aeolun 2y ago

Isn’t OpenAI profitable if they stop training right at this moment? Just because they’re immediately reinvesting all that cash doesn’t mean they’re not profitable.

Attach6156 2y ago
And if they stop training right now their "moat" (which I think is only o1 as of today) would last a good 3 to 6 months lol, and then to the Wendy's it is.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  That is similarly true for all other AI companies. It’s why they don’t do that. But everyone is still happy to give them more money because their offering is good as it is.
- wyclif 2y ago
  >and then to the Wendy's it is I didn't really catch that pop culture reference. What does that mean?
  - slater 2y ago
    My guess: The competition catches up, you lose all paying clients, and you get to apply for jobs at Wendy's...?
    - wyclif 2y ago
      Or does it mean it's a trivial decision, as trivial as deciding what fast food joint to choose?
      - slater 2y ago
        Guess we'll never know :(
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

hackernewds 2y ago

Lots of companies have. Most recently Character AI trained an internal model and did raise $100M early last year. They didn't release any benchmarks since the founding team and Noam taken to Google

elcomet 2y ago

Not everyone is doing LLM training. I know plenty of startups selling AI products for various image tasks (agriculture, satellite, medical...)

mark_l_watson 2y ago
Yes, a lot of the money to be made is in the middleware and application sides of development. I find even small models like Llama 3.2 2B to be extremely useful and fine tuning and integration with existing businesses can have a large potential payoff for smaller investments.

tonetegeatinst 2y ago

Pretty sure anthropic has