Technology

How many companies allow their employees to also be employed by their competitors?

Your idea of an AI being like an employee only if there's an AI company that will agree to an exclusive contract or at the very least respect data ownership and respect privacy. Is there an AI company that's like that?

@prime_number_314159
Maybe their business model does not depend on productivity. If the rate they charge for a developer with AI and without AI is approximately the same, they rather sell two people than making one more productive.
@FirmDistribution

The Haiku 5.5 model is actually quite inexpensive. I've used it to implement multiple features this month and have only spent $4 of my $20 monthly budget.

But anthropic and the others don't give subscriptions to enterprises, only tokens at full API prices

Not at the moment. It's definitely cheaper to buy LLMs as a service than running an in-house server hall. Anthropic and OpenAI are running at a loss, you know.

Now, risking to lose your data to the service provider is another thing.

We have a few dgx sparks in the office that are gathering dust right now because nobody wants to bother with them (and because IT doesn't allow them on the network because Linux is scary so they're a pain to get set up).

Matching the level of productivity of frontier models on the local models is possible to a limited degree (depending on the exact task), but takes getting used to. For the local models you have to lean into the fact that tokens are 'free' so its fine to burn a lot of them. (Whereas with frontier models the recommendation is to take a higher model for complex tasks because a lower would take more tries to get it right)

Look at it this way, if I pay Open AI $1k a month, their people make sure it works they month. If I let Joe from finance spend $10k on computer parts, Joe needs to ensure that it runs or I need to hire someone who is knowledgeable on local models. If I'm a simple firm, $12k a year might be cheaper because someone else makes sure it works and I can fire Joe when the fancy autocorrect loses a bunch of clients by falsifying work. Then I don't have to spend even bigger bucks hiring a new Joe because no one knows how to work the damn server he replaced the break room with.

Definitely. We do this at my job. But a server big enough to provide a comparable service would cost at least $30k. And you likely need more than one. And you still need someone to maintain it.

You can get plans as a business too, but then it's per user, so if your plan has $200 worth of "usage" per user and one uses $0, that does not mean another can use $400 and you still have to pay for the non-user's $200, or you can use API pricing to pay for exactly what your users use, which for OpenAI and Anthropic is egregious. You get like 10x more per dollar with the Chinese models. And some of those providers ALSO have plans that make it much cheaper.

i saw a post that was something like "youd think the cocaine class would understand why the first hit is free"

And it's going to cost a whole lot more once the investments dry up and they're going to have to actually pay for all the data centers under construction.

explain what you’re spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to

I love these chilling effects