I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?
Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.
I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.
(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)
I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI).
From what I understand, that’s not a coincidence. We’ve had the technology for LLMs for a long time. We just didn’t make them Large, because the training would have taken an eternity.
Then cryptocurrencies caused the GPU market to boom and then implode, which meant lots of cryptominers were selling their GPUs for dirt cheap. Perfect time to buy a bunch of GPUs, stick them in a server and try to do that eternity-long training.
And yeah, as for local chatbots, I do also imagine they will continue to be a thing, even if they won’t get any better anymore when the big companies stop doing the training.
But as you kind of also reasoned, I still don’t expect most of these companies to host their own chatbot…
I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?
I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.
(Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)
From what I understand, that’s not a coincidence. We’ve had the technology for LLMs for a long time. We just didn’t make them Large, because the training would have taken an eternity.
Then cryptocurrencies caused the GPU market to boom and then implode, which meant lots of cryptominers were selling their GPUs for dirt cheap. Perfect time to buy a bunch of GPUs, stick them in a server and try to do that eternity-long training.
And yeah, as for local chatbots, I do also imagine they will continue to be a thing, even if they won’t get any better anymore when the big companies stop doing the training.
But as you kind of also reasoned, I still don’t expect most of these companies to host their own chatbot…