I suspect it’s profitable in the abstract - and their accountants would be bad at their jobs if they couldn’t work out what utilisation rate you need to pay for the server runtime.
However how aggressively you amortise the cost of the training is the key, especially if you keep releasing new models every 6 months.
20 years ago, after 20 years of watching computers get faster and cheaper, I felt like they were “fast enough” - I mean, sure, more faster is more better, but for everything I had used computers for up to that point, they were fast enough - hell, they were already streaming DVD quality video by then on “normal” laptops. Certainly computers today are much faster still, but so much of that performance feels wasted on bloat rather than enhancing actual user experience.
LLM models seem to be evolving faster. A year ago, they were nowhere near good enough, but you could see the potential, much like desktop computers in the mid 1980s. Just make them faster, more powerful, more storage, higher resolution, you’ll really have something. Today, I feel about the LLMs (for code) almost like I felt about computers in 2006 - they’re good enough. Of course they could always get better, but if I were stuck with what we’ve got today for the next 5 years, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. The interesting question (that nobody seems to have a real answer for) is: how much better will they get. A year ago there were obvious rough edges that have quickly been smoothed off… how smooth can they actually get?
LLMs for graphic arts? Yeah, that feels like MS paint levels of performance at the moment, they definitely have room for improvement.
I suspect it’s profitable in the abstract - and their accountants would be bad at their jobs if they couldn’t work out what utilisation rate you need to pay for the server runtime.
However how aggressively you amortise the cost of the training is the key, especially if you keep releasing new models every 6 months.
20 years ago, after 20 years of watching computers get faster and cheaper, I felt like they were “fast enough” - I mean, sure, more faster is more better, but for everything I had used computers for up to that point, they were fast enough - hell, they were already streaming DVD quality video by then on “normal” laptops. Certainly computers today are much faster still, but so much of that performance feels wasted on bloat rather than enhancing actual user experience.
LLM models seem to be evolving faster. A year ago, they were nowhere near good enough, but you could see the potential, much like desktop computers in the mid 1980s. Just make them faster, more powerful, more storage, higher resolution, you’ll really have something. Today, I feel about the LLMs (for code) almost like I felt about computers in 2006 - they’re good enough. Of course they could always get better, but if I were stuck with what we’ve got today for the next 5 years, I wouldn’t be too disappointed. The interesting question (that nobody seems to have a real answer for) is: how much better will they get. A year ago there were obvious rough edges that have quickly been smoothed off… how smooth can they actually get?
LLMs for graphic arts? Yeah, that feels like MS paint levels of performance at the moment, they definitely have room for improvement.