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points by hauntingseaweed 4 days ago | 0 comments

Price war. Duh. There is no moat. Also them chinese competition. It’s going to be race to the bottom. It’s gonna be ugly for the stock market. Good for consumers though!

[–] SugarReflex 4 days ago

Can they do the same thing with fuel prices?

[–] dymk 4 days ago

Solar panels (which continue get cheaper every year) on my house makes charging my low-TCO EV free in 5 years

[–] elmer2 4 days ago

Until you start getting taxed.

[–] dymk 4 days ago

How do you figure that works?

[–] Supermancho 4 days ago

Solar panels added to a grid is not plug and play.

When you're connecting solar to a municipal grid (which is what most homes are connected to), it could theoretically be taxed or even subjected to a tariff. The "added" power (often excess) is monitored for billing credits/payout/other, among other reasons like grid integrity.

[–] crote 4 days ago

Solar panels are literally plug-and-play, though! If your market doesn't have plug-in "balcony solar" yet, it is because your lawmakers are blocking it.

And indeed, they can tax excess solar, but they can't tax the power you use yourself. Backfeed tax gets too high to use the grid as a battery? Buy a home battery, problem solved.

[–] dannyw 4 days ago

You can even buy a small solar panel for ~$10 with positive and negative leads you solder; and power something like a Pi Pico^ directly. It kinda feels like magic.

^Not recommended literally due to brownouts/etc, but a cheap power management IC on a breadboard can solve that. Alternatively, add a battery/etc.

Home solar panels and batteries are just like this except on a bigger scale; and with (hopefully) more QC.

[–] Supermancho 3 days ago

> Solar panels are literally plug-and-play

This is incorrect. Treating solar panels like batteries for specific appliances (or integrated like the panel on a Solocam S220), is not the use case nor is this a discussion about off-grid or microhomes.

I would suggest not making broad statements about what can and can't be taxed in the future.

[–] dymk 4 days ago

Plenty of grids have different sorts of net metering ratios, grid maintenance fees, etc. But it's nothing compared to what you'd be paying taking power off of the grid, and there is a break-even period often measured in single-digit years. I still do not understand the point of what the GP was trying to make w.r.t. "taxes".

[–] InsidiousWombat 3 days ago

Per KM driven. Your EV vendor will gladly use the telemetry to report that to government

[–] cryptonector 3 days ago

Mileage taxes on EVs.

[–] iAMkenough 4 days ago

Voters vote for Republicans that drive up TCO for EVs, like higher annual registration fees.

[–] qwerpy 4 days ago

Strange, I lived in very blue states (WA and CA) and they definitely punish EV owners with large annual surcharges on registrations. To offset “not paying gas tax”. Money is money, red or blue, they will all take as much as they can from you.

[–] scheme271 4 days ago

TBH, roads and highways are paid for by gas tax and it effectively functions as a usage tax. Something similar for EVs wouldn't be too wild.

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

That would likely require innovation in a renewable liquid fuel that can work at scale.

Electrification will drive the demand for oil down, making the overhead more expensive per gallon, and eventually we will largely move off of fossil fuels, though I don't expect completely. It will be many decades due to the turnover times for industrial/commercial transportation systems.

[–] dwattttt 4 days ago

If you make it easy for lots of people to make the fuel, yes. EVs and smaller scale power generation anyone?

[–] YetAnotherNick 4 days ago

Yes if China somehow gets the fuel and subsidize it to sell it for cheaper in the global world, even the gulf state price will go down.

[–] cactusplant7374 4 days ago

The moat is high TPS. No one has rolled it to average consumers though.

[–] vikramkr 4 days ago

Tokens per second? That only really matters for things like chat and sessions where you are monitoring a session as it runs which is going to be an increasingly small percentage of usage. That's bottlenecked by human attention. Agents in the background, long running tasks, unattended tasks, all that stuff is what is even capable of driving significant usage because you can just increase consumption massively by parallelizing without being the bottleneck. I wouldn't be shocked if already the vast majority of token usage was from unattended sessions. TPS is not that important there

[–] imtringued 3 days ago

You're ignoring the fact that a waiting human costs money which is actually the primary reason why AI hasn't resulted in significant productivity increases, while overly focusing on the human being the bottleneck. The point isn't to monitor the session, the point is to verify the output with human inspection. If the agent is fast enough, attending to the agent can make financial sense.

Human memory has a finite capacity and decays over time. If you do many inspection tasks in parallel you are splitting that finite memory. If you do the same tasks sequentially, the human can give instant feedback to the model without costly context switching. This in turn increases iteration speed and reduces total labor costs. This is no different from developers preferring JavaScript or Python for immediate feedback and fast iterations.

[–] cactusplant7374 4 days ago

It is impossible to make sophisticated software products at a high level with a low TPS. Try making a modern emulator or an award winning game. Both require a lot of iteration and not everything works well with multi agent.

[–] gmerc 4 days ago

DeepSeek is serving more TPS than anyone, about as much as OpenRouter does in a week in a day, at 38$/H800/Ascend so about 900k/~90% profit over 3 years (or ~80s% profit including training expenses).

Meanwhile, Oracle is handing Tencent 100.000 GPUs at 1.60$ hour, dangerously close to breakeven...

What does this tell you?

[–] rico735 4 days ago

Doubt the race to the bottom is really good for consumers, unless you actually just want more stuff rather than better stuff. The bubble bursting is going to be pretty horrible financially for us all.

The main thing it seems to have done so far is made everything feel less trustworthy, and everything digital less safe. It has empowered scammers, that's for sure.

And for what benefit? Spunking out 7/10 code a bit faster with your brain turned off. Great!

[–] gmerc 4 days ago

Wait what, OpenAI is trustworthy now?

[–] rico735 4 days ago

Not sure where you got that from my comment.

[–] 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago

Just wait until the government ban on the dangerous open models materializes.

[–] chasd00 4 days ago

It won’t be a ban, it will be some “certified safe” badge from a federal agency. Companies will be scared into not using anything that is not “certified safe” and business insurance will even require it. Whoever (openAI or Anthropic) gets to the politicians first will be the only certified safe model provider.

Maybe the FDA is a good analogy, you wouldn’t want to buy meat at the store not FDA certified would you? OpenAI and Anthropic want you to feel the same about AI.

[–] ern 4 days ago

I'm not an American, but I thought the FDA didn't certify stores

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

I do not expect an outright ban. (1) the bots are too useful, open is the way, re: HF handling the incident (2) you can train without certain capabilities, see Kimi K3.1 (3) reminiscent of the encryption is dangerous debate of the '90s

There will likely be requirements like registering with the government (China already does this, every business already does everywhere), certain usages require more or have deeper regulations (this is already done with most technologies, depending on application)

[–] 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago

I think it will not technically be a ban, but a de facto one.

Some variation on, "Open weight models must be A) trained in the USA B) have a public training dataset + training pipeline C) be reviewed by a government 'safety council', etc" Something which technically leaves a crack open for someone to release a less capable model than the commercial ones.

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

That kind of policy will hold a country back, and why I don't think it will happen. There are already many companies already using Chinese models.

Another confounding factor, if a US company fine-tunes a Chinese model, or vice versa, what is that country that should be assigned to that model.

You also have to consider the competition between the US and China. If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and Ai. The think tanks that talk with legislators understand this.

[–] throw10920 3 days ago

> If the US did something like this, the world will move to Chinese hardware and AI

Hardware? Why would anyone change their hardware based on this? That's completely unrelated.

And as for Chinese LLMs - there's already evidence that the Chinese are training malicious behavior into their models. I think most countries would rather train their own models than risk that.

[–] 3eb7988a1663 4 days ago

You have more faith than I do. It would be bad policy, but hardly a first for a government who wielded tariffs like a cudgel in spite of obvious repercussions.

[–] vikramkr 4 days ago

honestly the surprising thing at this point would be if america did actually pass a policy of any sort, good or bad, vs just relying on the president to yolo some executive orders now and then that change every 2 years. Plus at least for the next couple years nvidia likes open source models and the president likes the ceo of nvidia. There could be a falling out but nvidia has deep pockets to ... discourage ... a falling out.

It's worth remembering that the tariff stuff is not any sort of durable policy. It's one guy sort of doing whatever until 9 other guys a year later go 'hey wait' and then the first guy does whatever again anyway. The whole thing is just a recipe for whiplash. maybe congress remembers that they're supposed to do stuff in a few months and steps in. maybe they don't and then every 4 years we have wild swings in enforced based on which half of a percent of the voters in georgia had rainy weather where they lived in early november. More of a simultaneous "All of the above and also none of the above" deal until the dynamics of american government fundamentally shift

[–] verdverm 4 days ago

There are people in Trump's inner most circle that know this. I'm not worried about it. People trust those calling for regulatory capture (Dario / Altman) the least. (HN is not a good representation of the general population and AI userbase)

[–] dannyw 4 days ago

NVIDIA won't be too happy about that; alongside Micron, etc.

US commercial interest =/= OpenAI and Anthropic.

[–] mike_hearn 4 days ago

NVIDIA would love it. They themselves make available open weight models trained in the USA with open data sets, because they don't really care whose models are used as long as they run on NVIDIA hardware. The idea that only China makes open weight models isn't true, there are many other providers and some of them are quite good.

[–] CamperBob2 4 days ago

There will likely be requirements like registering with the government

Sadly, my GPUs were lost in a tragic boating accident.

[–] pixl97 4 days ago

Not just models, won't be long before hardware is regulated too.

[–] shwaj 4 days ago

Sounds like an eventual Supreme Court case.