• chilicheeselies@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting. They tried with Stadia to get people to play games hosted in the cloud, but that was never going to fly.

    With the compute demands of AI (which is comparable to a AAA game except for the largest models), they dont want to make the same mistake and let you have the compute. They see this as an oppurtunity for subscription fees for the earth.

    The fact that we cant get hardware for a reasonable price is an added bonus to this plan.

    All of this only works of everyone subscribes to this shit. Businesses will, because its just easier to manage it. Consumers though should not give in. If you want to run an agent, use a small local model.

    The best thing that can be done is to make local open source agents and models approachable for regular users. Right now, they arent.

    • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      I work for a large retailer that you’ve definitely heard of. We are pulling away from our cloud hosted presence and are building out a self-managed virtual data center in one of our own physical data centers.

      Even enterprise knows that paying a monthly uncontrolled cost is shit.

    • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.

      Imagine the mental health benefits when AI datacentres make computers unaffordable, so we all have to go outside more, and then the AI datacentres shrivel because they have no customers, because we can’t access anything with no computers. So the AI companies die off.

      I can dream, ok?

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        12 hours ago

        I would love this to be an unintended outcome from all this. However, I don’t think that’s where we’re headed.

        I, for one, think there’s a lot of slop in and around the engineering of phones. We might see a lot more software, storage, and overall activity crunched, compressed, and crammed into our portable devices instead. And with more stuff in the cloud/SaaS realm, they can also become (even) thinner clients at the same time. :(

        It’s “heavier” gear like laptops and desktops that’ll probably get pushed into the pro and “prosumer” market.

    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.

      Thankfully there’s a growing number of businesses that have been burned by this, and it seems like companies are starting to try bringing their critical systems back in-house again

      • chilicheeselies@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        There is this tipping point where it becomes more cost effective to bring it inhouse, even with the staffing requirements. For small to medium sized buinesses though cloud all the way.

        • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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          13 hours ago

          where it becomes more cost effective

          Reliability and risk are also factors. What do you do when a vendor tries to lock you into a walled garden before cranking up prices? What about storage of sensitive information? Sometimes the additional cost of doing it in-house pays off in ways that are difficult to track