[assuagering]

If your economic analysis depends on "one of those super-rich players to pay" for it to work, it isn't as much analysis as wishful thinking.

All the 100s of billions of $ put into the models so far were not donations. They either make it back to the investors or the show stops at some point.

And with a major chunk of proponent's arguments being "it will keep getting better", if you lose that what you got? "This thing can spit out boilerplate code, re-arrange documents and sometimes corrupts data silently and in hard to detect ways but hey you can run it locally and cheaply"?

[TeMPOraL]

The economic analysis is not mine, and I though it was pretty well-known by now: Meta is not in the compute biz and doesn't want to be in it, so by releasing Llamas, it denies Google, Microsoft and Amazon the ability to build a moat around LLM inference. Commoditize your complement and all that. Meta wants to use LLMs, not sell access to them, so occasionally burning a billion dollars to train and give away an open-weight SOTA model is a good investment, because it directly and indirectly keeps inference cheap for everyone.

[assuagering]

You understand that according to what you just said, economically the current SOTA is untenable?

Which, again, leads to a future where we're stuck with local models corrupting data about half the time.