How many projects get to the point where they're at 50 or 100 people online at the same time but fail due to technical issues before they reach 50k? I would say very few. 99% of the time the problem is that they never reach that simultaneous 100 people due to other, non-technical issues like not being a product that people really want. If you've got 50k people wanting to use your product it's a success even if you've got technical problems and it's crashing all the time.
"What if the AI goes away" seems to be a common argument but it's just not ever going to happen without, say, a solar flare wiping out all electronics, which will be an issue which skilled programmers can't help anyway. The same thing happened when high-level languages came around, not many people can hand-write assembly anymore or work with punch cards but society hasn't collapsed.
So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as a way to soften them up before acquisition.
It's not that subsidised, this is just wishful thinking. You can run a local model like Qwen for equivalent prices. You might see it go up to $0.50/hr but you're definitely not going to see it at $22
I do run open models locally, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they're functionally competitive. I'm extremely skeptical of anybody claiming they've obviated a $22/hr job with an open model. Qwen is a big step down in capability. I can play with something like k2.5 for awhile, but if I want real work done I'm going back to a frontier model, which has significant runtime requirements for inference.
You're also ignoring the cost of purchasing and amortizing dedicated hardware in your local model example.
I disagree, I think things are getting better. Apart from house prices I think almost everything here (Australia) is better than it used to be. The trains run on a better schedule. You get more varied, better food, more people can eat out, you can travel anywhere much cheaper. Every year we get better technology that's cheaper. Jobs are easier than in the past. More people are into fitness, there are new drugs out all the time that cure illnesses that we thought couldn't be treated (cancers, cystic fibrosis, obesity). Movies are better (maybe not TV), there is much more entertainment.
People have rose-tinted glasses but my parents' generation grew up eating bread with dripping, working back-breaking jobs, getting exposed to stuff like thalidomide and asbestos, living in small houses and only having the TV and the pub to entertain them.
That's just how wars are named, it's not some grand conspiracy. It was the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, the Vietnam War, the Crimean War. They don't call it the War on Ukraine either.
It's a common distancing language used for current wars by the news media (particularly in the US.) It's not how "wars are named" in any more general sense.
> It was the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, the Vietnam War, the Crimean War.
Only two of those follow the pattern you suggest is "just the way wars are named".
> They don't call it the War on Ukraine either.
Outside of news media reports, it is the Russo-Ukrainian War, not "the War in Ukraine", while in media reports it is "the War in Ukraine" (often even when the events being discussed are factually in what is, undisputedly, Russia.)
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