points by Forgeties79 4 days ago | 0 comments
If 10 people are sharing it the speed advantages suddenly drop drastically. That’s $2500 a head. 5 would be $5k. Then all the rules and such you need in place
This is all this stuff that dries people to pay for frontier models. Even running modest models requires a few thousand, unless you just want really lean ones. People don’t need frontier but it’s not cheap to effectively run, say, a 16gb Qwen 3.6 or 3.8 in the 30b range. Ram is like $15/gb and GPU’s with 16gb vram are hardly cheap.
[–] dekhn 3 days ago
[–] wtch98 4 days ago
In the 90s we'd pay $5k a head (inflation adjusted - about $2k then) for a 486 with 80MB of disk space
[–] Forgeties79 3 days ago
Yes 30-40 years ago when home computers were still a pretty new technology you paid a lot of money just to have them.
[–] wtch98 3 days ago
And all sorts of companies, from small businesses to multinationals, and a fair few people at home, paid it.
Businesses were quite happy to spend $5k on technology for a worker if it makes things better, why wouldn't they today.
[–] Forgeties79 2 days ago
Unless I read it wrong, it sounds like this guy did not get it paid for by his employer - he runs multiple companies and is an angel investor with clearly deep pockets - and I have people talking about it being an investment in their careers. He could be using it support his businesses, yes, but that needs to be clarified and is still not a situation most people find themselves in.
This is not a straightforward business expense conversation IMO. Otherwise yes I do agree with you. A company should invest in supporting local models for their team.
The lesson it taught me is that swapping is slow and that if it happens during your software development, you're much less productive. When I finally maxxed out the RAM on my machine, I could run linux + emacs + X11 + bash + g++ all at the same time, making me about 10X more productive. It's an investment and lesson that has helped me build my career over decades.