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But economically, it is still much better to buy a lower spec't laptop and to pay a monthly subscription for AI. However, I agree with the article that people
by whazor 10mo ago
But economically, it is still much better to buy a lower spec't laptop and to pay a monthly subscription for AI.
However, I agree with the article that people will run big LLMs on their laptop N years down the line. Especially if hardware outgrows best-in-class LLM model requirements. If a phone could run a 512GB LLM model fast, you would want it.
- ignoramous 10mo ago> economically, it is still much better to buy a lower spec't laptop and to pay a monthly subscription for AI Uber is economical, too; but folks prefer to own cars, sometimes multiple. And how there's market for all kinds of vanity cars, fast sportscars, expensive supercars... I imagine PCs & Laptops will have such a market, too: In probably less than a decade, may be a £20k laptop running a 671b+ LLM locally will be the norm among pros.
- joshred 10mo agoPaying $30-$70/day to commute is economical?
- ignoramous 10mo ago> Paying $30-$70/day to commute is economical? When LLM use approaches this number, running one locally would be, yes. What you and other commentator seem to miss is, "Uber" is a stand-in for Cloud-based LLMs: Someone else builds and owns those servers, runs the LLMs, pays the electricity bills... while its users find it "economical" to rent it. (btw, taxis are considered economical in parts of the world where owning cars is a luxury)
- zmmmmm 10mo agoif you calculate depreciation and running costs on a new car in most places - I think it probably would be.
- adrianN 10mo agoIf Uber were cheaper than the depreciation and running costs of a car, what would be left for the driver (and Uber)?
- cjbgkagh 10mo agoThe depreciation would be amortized to cover more than one person. I only travel once or twice per week, it cost me less to use an Uber than to own a car.
- zmmmmm 10mo agoa big part of the whole "hack" of Uber in the first place is that people are using their personal vehicles. So the depreciation and many of the running costs are sunk costs already. Once you paid those already it becomes a super good deal to make money from the "free" asset you already own.
- robotresearcher 10mo agoMy private car provides less than one commute per day, on average. An Uber car can provide several.
- __turbobrew__ 10mo agoWhile your car in sitting in the parking lot, the uber driver is utilizing their car throughout the day.
- FuckButtons 10mo agoIf you’re using uber to and from work, presumably you would buy a car that’s worth more than the 10 year old Prius your uber driver has 200k miles on.
- subjectsigma 10mo ago> Uber is economical, too One time I took an Uber to work because my car broke down and was in the shop and the Uber driver (somewhat pointedly) made a comment that I must be really rich to commute to work via Uber because Ubers are so expensive
- prmoustache 10mo agoMost people don't realise the amount of money they spend per year on cars.
- m4rtink 10mo agoAre you sure the subscription will still be affordable after the venture capital flood ends and the dumping stops?
- nl 10mo ago100% yes. The amount of compute in the world is doubling over 2 years because of the ongoing investment in AI (!!) In some scenario where new investment stops flowing and some AI companies go bankrupt all that compute will be looking for a market. Inference providers are already profitable so with cheaper hardware it will mean even cheaper AI systems.
- oa335 10mo ago> Inference providers are already profitable. That surprises me, do you remember where you learned that?
- nl 10mo agoLots of sources, and you can do the math yourself. Here's a few good ones: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/202502OpenSourceWeek/day_6_one_more_thing_deepseekV3R1_inference_system_overview.md https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20... (suggests Deepseek is making 80% raw margin on inference) https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/ https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch... https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-really-losing-money-on-inference/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... (there's a HN discussion of this where it was pointed out this overestimates the costs) https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-from-first https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/llm-inference-economics-fr... (long, but the TL;DR is that serving Lllama 3.3 70B costs around $0.28/million tokens input, $0.95 output at high utilization. These are close to what we see in the market: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/providers?pricing-relationships=input-and-output-pricing https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/llama-3-3-instruct-70b/... )
- AyyEye 10mo ago
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoRunning an LLM locally means you never have to worry about how many tokens you've used, and also it allows for a lot of low latency interactions on smaller models that can run quickly. I don't see why consumer hardware won't evolve to run more LLMs locally. It is a nice goal to strive for, which consumer hardware makers have been missing for a decade now. It is definitely achievable, especially if you just care about inference.
- KellyCriterion 10mo agoisnt this what all these NPUs are created for?
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoI haven’t seen an NPU that can compete with a GPU yet. Maybe for really small models, I’m still not sure where they are going with those.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agoany "it's cheaper to rent than to own" arguments can be (and must be) completely disregarded due to experience of the last decade so stop it