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A comment on Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2. Parent comment

Re:Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2 by cyanydeez on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:15PM (#50444004)
local model qwen3.8-flash-next can do just as well. I'm mostly curious what the actual inference costs are; people keep saying the APIs are real, but it's clear there's a "addictive" reality these model providers are cultivating and once enough businesses and users are attached to the cloud infrastructure, it's just going to first go "well, this is the actual cost" to "there's no other providers out there".

Anyway, if you can afford it, I'd recommend charting a path to local inference.

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Re:Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2 by wongarsu on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @01:43PM (#50444402)
For SotA models future costs are an uncertainty to take into account. But for weights-available models like deepseek or qwen there are plenty of providers that just own GPUs and run inference, batched over many customers. Those have very little incentive to run inference as a loss leader. What it costs today is very likely the true price, with some marginal profit for them

The only thing you really have to worry about in that case is them cross-financing by siphoning off your data and selling it, or them being run by an intelligence agency, or something like that. Of course they all promise that that's not the case, and some have all the certifications you can wish for

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Re:Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2 by BobbyTables2 on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:07PM (#50449649)
At this point, I wonder if that is the real game and providing AI services is only the side business…

Imagine how much deeply private corporate data is being feed to 3rd-party hosted AI models.

They get to see what even Google doesn’t get to see.

Let that sink in…

And, yeah, they have an AI that can comb through it faster than any human and better than any dumb algorithm.

But yeah, the convenience is so tempting, how many can say no? The Devil was never this clever…

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