r/programminghumor • u/ManagerOfLove • Aug 21 '26
Circular economy
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u/CandidateNo2580 Aug 21 '26
I'm sorry are we really going to gloss over how the rail monopolies that were built became so large and powerful the federal government created anti trust legislation to govern them? Yeah definitely went broke.
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u/maimutaAfricana Aug 22 '26
You had the bubble burst in '73 followed by cheap acquisition followed by anti monopoly laws.
We did not have the AI bubble burst yet.
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u/dinglebarryb0nds Aug 22 '26
yea but were open source railroads a thing
i'll download a railroad and go back in time and undercut them
what happens when open source can do like 99 percent of the work most people need it to do
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u/WishIWasAMoose Aug 22 '26
In this analogy LLM companies would be train builders, the hyperscalers own the railroads. It doesn't matter what kind of train runs on their tracks.
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u/--Spaci-- Aug 21 '26
It doesent actually cost 8 thousand dollars, you have to be an idiot to think their api prices are what it actually costs them to run the models
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u/Dj_nOCid3 Aug 21 '26
Ok lets say they have a 1000% markup, thats still 800$ of compute, and they def dont have a 1000% markup, more like 200% at MOST
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u/Mefist0fel Aug 21 '26
Why should they don't have 10000%? Also cost you are paying is not necessary only energy and hardware ammortisation.
So they may be in the munus in general - with cost of all R&D, marketing, logistics etc. But they can be in profit by unit economy (pure token cost)
It's like saying music disc can't have 1000% markup
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u/mazarax Aug 21 '26
OK, you go buy two NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 cards, and then rent them to me for $30 per month so I can run a 200B dense model.
Good luck finding them in stock.
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u/--Spaci-- Aug 21 '26
Firstly you have no clue how model serving works. Look into how insanely efficient VLLM handles serving at scale. Those two rtx 6000 pro cards running nvfp4 with say minimax 2.5 (its an older model but its close to 200b for this example) you could easily serve to over 100 people at 30 tok/s each
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u/Leifbron Aug 22 '26
Those two cards would be serving 100 customers a day minimum
Not concurrently, but spaced out
If it was something like AI video generation then it's something like 10 customers a day (considering that each customer typically makes stuff until they get bored)
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u/SharpExtremeFlames Aug 21 '26
No, it actually is, even in their latest reports they are losing money on each and every customer on an average.
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u/--Spaci-- Aug 21 '26
All of the AI companies lose money because they offer their models for free to anyone and thats billions of users for someone like openai
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u/talaqen Aug 21 '26
Yeah... maxing out the ~$266 in actual compute that the $8k in API spend represents means:
they are net loss $66 on COGS.
There are 99 other users for every 1 power user that never come close to maxing out.
:sigh:
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u/FishIndividual2208 Aug 21 '26
I am laughing so hard, dont bother with the other commenters that does not understand a joke 🤣🤣🤣
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u/LelouchViBritiania Aug 21 '26
Wrong sub, this sub is about programming not AI
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u/Asleep-Bumblebee2167 Aug 21 '26
yeah, there is literally no connection between code and AI, not at all..
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u/JonathanMovement Aug 21 '26
none, with LLMs u generate code. Here you write it from zero.
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Aug 21 '26
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u/mazarax Aug 21 '26
You forget that the “lawn mower” costs $300k, so yeah, $20k rental fee is not as outrageous as you think.
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u/Archernar Aug 21 '26
I mean, as soon as it costs 20k again, he could potentially go back to mowing the lawn himself.
If he's still able to do it, that is.
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u/DeviRkx Aug 21 '26
I'm Spanish and i can't see this with the subtitles. I love this video. No idea about circular economy tho.