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A comment on LLMs Are Cheap. Parent comment

Re:LLMs Are Cheap by otterley on Monday June 09, 2025 @10:39AM (#44224962)
That’s a little like saying you can compute the profitability of the energy market by looking only at the margins of gas stations. You can’t exclude all the outlays on actually acquiring the product to sell.
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Re:LLMs Are Cheap by lazide on Monday June 09, 2025 @02:09PM (#44227325)
Sure - but is there any doubt in that example that gas stations are making a profit?

And unlike gasoline, once models are trained there is no significant ongoing production cost.

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Re:LLMs Are Cheap by otterley on Monday June 09, 2025 @04:28PM (#44229087)
Models aren't static. In order for them to remain relevant, they have to be constantly retrained with new data. Plus there's a model arms race going on and which will probably continue for the foreseeable future.
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Re:LLMs Are Cheap by lazide on Tuesday June 10, 2025 @04:55AM (#44234280)
Fair point - though various distilling and retraining tricks do reduce the cost quite a bit. It’s not like everyone is doing all the work they had to do from scratch, every time.
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