4 ms·
Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
by geon 3mo ago
Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
- jonatron 3mo agoApples and oranges, or chalk and cheese. Why would you say apples and potatoes?
- nerbert 3mo agoGrape and aspergus, we all get it
- inigyou 3mo agowe all get aspergus down here at HN
- arrowsmith 3mo agoMaybe an ESL thing? "Potatoes" are literally called "earth apples" in some languages (e.g. pommes de terre in French; Erdäpfel in some German dialects.)
- danaris 3mo agoI read it as trying to indicate that it's even more different than apples and oranges. Not sure it succeeds in that, but I think that's the intent.
- geon 3mo agoCorrect
- HappMacDonald 3mo agoI'd have probably gone with "Apples and Orangutans"
- geon 3mo agoClever. Wish I had thought of that.
- klibertp 3mo agoI came to appreciate typos, slightly ungrammatical sentences, and creative plays on common phrases. They are completely absent in LLM output without a specialized prompt (and they seem to struggle to make believable language mistakes even when prompted), so they can serve as a signal when judging whether the text I'm reading was written by a human. As an aside, I observed my stance on proper English use changing in real time over the past 2-3 years. I used to be proud of writing clinically correct prose, and found mistakes in grammar and vocabulary grating. Now, I kind of welcome them and have stopped caring at all about committing such language crimes. I used to cringe when someone didn't capitalize the first words in their sentences - not anymore. I think we're years away from LLMs convincingly faking human-like mistakes (since all the work currently goes into avoiding them), so it's going to remain a useful signal for a while.
- avaer 3mo agoI don't know, compute is compute. Arguably making complex software with LLMs isn't all that different from training a model to do a thing. You're throwing a lot of compute at the problem and hoping for a stochastic solution. The distinction will become even blurrier with time. Though I agree it might be informative to split it by industry sector.
- alexjurkiewicz 3mo agoAI training uses wildly more compute than most companies, who are generally building domain specific CRUD apps. Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI.
- eru 3mo ago> Compare AI costs per-engineer-salary-dollar, because more expensive engineers probably need more expensive AI. Let's see how this works out in the long run. For a historical analog, more expensive engineers don't use more expensive computers (by and large).
- ThunderSizzle 3mo agoWhich is probably a backwards anti-pattern companies have built. Your most expensive engineer's time is most valuable, so if you give them standard issue which is half the speed, you are throttling the value you can get from your engineer. Not to mention the mental drain of your cursor barely being able to move due to all the bloated virtual networking systemization. It would seem to make sense to give more valuable employees faster equipment, so that their time isn't spent toiling with the slow machine, but rather actually producing value.
- eru 3mo agoEh, computers are so (comparatively) cheap, that you can give all your employees top-of-the-line equipment by that logic. (Well, for this to make sense, you need good computers to be cheap, but the returns to diminish quickly after that. Which used to be the case until fairly recently: single core performance was pretty much capped, and after your whole compile is parallelised adding more cores to a machine didn't really help your best engineer either. Similarly for RAM.)
- psychoslave 3mo agoApples and potatoes are both something people will need to eat if we want to see it from the human utility perspective, and they both require some land space to be allocated for their culture (though one can of course conjugate both culture). If you want to take the DDG LLM summary at fate value, apples are lower in calories and sugar but higher in fiber compared to potatoes, which are richer in vitamins and minerals like potassium and vitamin B6. Overall, apples provide more dietary fiber, while potatoes offer more protein and essential nutrients. Comparison rarely lead to one obvious all superior option that discard every other considerations.
- croisillon 3mo agothe saying "comparing x and y" implies that you compare something that one of them can't compete ; if people praise the softness of the skin first and foremost, comparing apples and potatoes won't lead interesting results
- psychoslave 3mo agoYes, that’s certainly what people mean generally. Now if we consider perspectives like the one elaborated by Marcel Detienne in Comparer l'incomparable[1], we can go a bit further. The comparison no longer starts with the goal to assess distinct objects in the frame of a given more or less established framework, and instead our attention is framed toward challenging ourself. That is, anchored toward finding what frameworks would allow to assess anything meaningful. And latter on, what does frameworks and framework creation reveals about ourself. [1] https://archive.org/details/comparerlincompa0000deti https://archive.org/details/comparerlincompa0000deti
- iLoveOncall 3mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models. So you absolute should include it.
- zaphirplane 3mo agoWell … one was a non profit and I still can’t figure out how it kept the donations the tax benefits and because a trillion for profit company
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoWhy can't we pass on the costs of OpenAI and Anthropic's training back to OpenAI and Anthropic? Bandwidth isn't free, and all my life I've been told that piracy is theft.
- stavros 3mo agoBecause the money that OpenAI and Anthropic have to pay those costs with comes from the users who pay for the service. There is no "passing the cost" of anything. The consumer always pays all costs.
- ErroneousBosh 3mo agoRight, but I'm not a consumer. Who do I pass my costs for dealing with OpenAI and Anthropic on to?
- onion2k 3mo agoOpenAI and Anthropic aren't charities, so whatever cost they inccur for training will be passed down to the companies using the models You should, but with two important caveats. First, you don't know what their amortization schedule is like so you don't know what the impact on the pricing will be (are they going to pass the cost on over 5 years or over 20 years?), and second they may go bust before paying the cost down so they may not get a chance to pass it all on. If someone buys the company then they'll get a discount on the value, which means the training costs are just eaten by the investors.
- peppevignanello 3mo agoExactly, it's like saying Shell is spending a fortune on fuel compared to what they spend on employees, if you count oil extraction costs as 'fuel'.
- general1465 3mo agoSo where are these training costs getting paid from?
- ssivark 3mo agoIt'll get paid from revenue, not by redirecting employee salaries. All that AI+compute is literally what customers pay Anthropic for. Big AI labs are not software companies where payroll dominates expenses. They're capex-heavy industrial entities; it just so happens that the "machines" (whose output they sell) are nominally the same category as the devices that their knowledge worker employees use on their desks.
- seasox 3mo agoVC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.
- arjie 3mo agoThat's about to change: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... Anthropic was profitable last quarter.
- debugnik 3mo agoxAI is discounting the first few months of their rental to Anthropic, which will help them seem profitable for a bit longer. We'll need to see if that lasts.
- surgical_fire 3mo agoHello kind sir, may I interest you in some bridges I have for sale?
- niyikiza 3mo agoI guess they should include tuition cost as well.
- mazurnification 3mo agoIn a way in US it is - _IF_ ppl were rational economic agents and free market allocation worked student loans should reflect on the wages too.
- tryagainian 3mo ago[dead]
- ThunderSizzle 3mo agoLuckily we're not, because then your tip to a waiter/waitress would be dependent on their student loans remaining, especially considering how many expensive liberal arts majors struggle to find a sufficient career.
- rh94 3mo agoExcatly, further more it really depends on who is using it and how value is compared not $. Senior engineers growing without ai will probably deliver 10x in value then ppl who just found out about ai yesterday. Doesn’t matter how much you spent dolar wise