I keep seeing articles like these popup. I am in the industry but not in the “AI” industry.
What I have no concept of, is the current subsidized, VC funded, anywhere close to what the final product will be?
I always fall back to the Uber paradox. Yes it was great at first, now it’s 3x what it cost and has only given cabs pricing power. This was good for consumers to start but now it’s just another part of the k shaped economy.
So is that ultimately where AI goes? Top percent can afford a high monthly subscription and the not so fortunate get there free 5 minutes per month
But even if that did happen, the open source models are excellent and cost virtually nothing?
Like I prefer Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 to the open weights models, but if Anthropic or Google upped the pricing 10x then everyone would switch to the open weights models.
Arguably you could say that the Chinese labs may stop releasing them, true, but even if all model development stopped today then they'd still be extremely useful and a decent competitor.
Again I’m not in the “AI” industry so I don’t fully understand the economics and don’t run open models locally.
What’s the cost to run this stuff locally, what type of hardware is required. When you say virtually nothing, do you mean that’s because you already have a 2k laptop or gpu?
Again I am only asking because I don’t know. Would these local models run OK on my 2016 Mac Pro intel or do I need to upgrade to the latest M4 chip with 32GB memory for it to work correctly?
The large open-weights models aren't really usable for local running (even with current hardware), but multiple providers compete on running inference for you, so it's reasonable to assume that there is and will be a functioning marketplace.
Basically yes, the useful models need a modernish GPU to get inference running at a usable speed. You can get smaller parameter models 3b/7b running on older laptops, it just won’t produce output at a useful speed.
