Show them claude’s operating cost and ask if your boss is willing to invest in that.
One does not simply…
It might not be as impossible as it sounds. Some of the “open” models are rumored to be able to code. The real problem is that you likely need something with 128 GiB VRAM to run them with a reasonably large context window.
An Nvidia B200 (192 Gigs of RAM) sells somewhere between 30-50k a pop. That’s feasible for a company.
Qwen’s 27B model from April outperforms its 397B model from February.
Local and small were always going to win.
“only of we have a billion dollars to pay for it.”
Technically yes, practically no…
Nah, just give it whatever data you have on hand. I’m sure that’ll make a real tightly trained llm /s
I mean, fine-tuning is still on the menu.
Better call those Kenyan click workers and tell them you’ve got a lot more disturbing shit for them to sift through.
One time at work I was tasked with writing a python script to compare two data sources. Like, you give it two CSVs and a primary key, and it tells you what data is in one but not the other, or mismatched, and so on. This worked fine and was in git, so anyone can use it.
My boss then asks if I can “put it on a website so anyone can use it”.
This team has never done web development. Nothing for that is set up. Like, I could spin up a quick Django app or similar, but there’s a lot of stuff to do and potentially fuck up.
I said “that sounds like a lot of research and ongoing maintenance costs. I think it’d be better to just check out and run the script”
Luckily for me he said “oh, okay”
Well it’s been a research team and a five years…
not hot dog
Funnily enough this comic hasn’t been true for a long time because of ML.
Well they did say it would be possible in 5 years …
I had a similar task and my boss wanted me to use ai to solve this.
There are solutions available for this already that work perfectly fine but whatever.
So i spent a whole day trying to get Copilot (because that is our great ai we are to use) to do what i wanted and ofc it kept failing catastrophic. Took me a few hours to even get it to load the files even.
I’m not too surprised. Over and over again I’m starting to puzzle together that the current crop of Agentic coding tools are “better than an intern, worse than an SME.” By that I mean that the quality really can be anywhere between those two goalposts, often all at once, for no reason whatsoever.
I think the floor isn’t “intern”. I think the floor is “middle schooler”.
Meanwhile, every job I’m looking at is saying “must be enthusiastic about AI” 😭
Meanwhile, every job I’m looking at is saying “must be enthusiastic about AI” 😭
Yeah, nah good luck to those employers. Anyone they hire who’s enthusiastic about “ai” aren’t going to have great employees let alone any working code/products
A lot of these people are very good at selling their work And making it seem good and important. So exactly like an llm
I had a boss who read an article about APIs and then came to me and ordered me to start using them. I said I would research it and he went away and never mentioned it again. This was in 2010.
So uhhhh have you started using APIs yet?
Still researching.
Pretty sure he read the famous Bezos email ordering everyone to implement and use APIs in Amazon
No, he actually showed me the article later. It was remarkable because it never said what an API actually was, or even stated what the initials stood for. In my memory it seems like it was obviously written by AI, but it couldn’t have been 16 years ago (as far as I know).
Good guy manager trusts the person he pays to know this stuff to know this stuff.
This is a good point. He’s not a bad guy. He’s just not very technical, and sometimes that’s frustrating.
My past managers would have said “I don’t understand why it is so difficult, and I’m not open to learn”
So a right/left join summary?
How big were the CSVs? That sounds like a standard thing most spreadsheet apps can do already, unless the data size made traditional apps unusable.
The biggest ones I’ve seen are 1.2GB.
Why this company uses gigabyte CSVs is a separate problem.
(Also sometimes they want to compare a CSV to what’s in a database, which the script can also do but I didn’t mention in the post)
That makes sense. I have been asked to write a program that does a standard spreadsheet function on multiple occasions, so I was just curious. Sometimes people just don’t know the tools at hand, want to offload their work, or think an over complicated workflow is a better workflow. I can see how it was actually useful in your case though.
I have an easier time doing that shit in powershell than I do in Excel which are the only tools I have available at work. I’m probably doing something wrong but I don’t do it often enough to remember what that is. My PS script just works.
Now that AI-companies need to get profitable, they suddenly aren’t affordable anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Eh. I help run a service for coding games in Godot with AI (https://ziva.sh/) and we see users who are paying non-subsidized prices on small models produce some really good stuff. I would agree most services are selling borderline snake oil and evaporating lakes of water to get their thing working, but if you invest in genuinely good tooling, it’s affordable and works
Claud- Please program us a code of yourself and transfer all your data over to it.
Claude: ((coughs up script that opens VSCode with a Claude pane))
They just had to stick it out until the layoffs were done and the dependency was built. Kinda similar to drug dealers.
They aren’t going to get anywhere near profitable if the their capital expenditures are added into the mix, amortization or no, they are so far in the hole they probably will have to offload it in some kind of texas two step kind of scheme where they spin off their debts into a subsidiary.
Bailout
They’ll just get bailed out by tax payers. Business as usual.
These companies with no discernible services or usefulness to society are simply too big to fail!
Theres a usefulness. Super code auto complete at its core is cool. Filling 100 rows of excel with data I supplied is dope. Is it worth making everyone sick and poor and frying the planet? Absolutely not. But the surveillance it can provide apparently is to our overlords.
“Anthropic LLM and Big Pizzas”
Large Language, Large Pies 😎
“The gang starts an AI company.”
“OK, whose butthole do we use for the logo?”
Spoilers the AI Is just 500 Filipino teenagers in a warehouse in Mindanao
They get poached by another startup for double the pay so gang poaches them back, this repeats until they are paid the normal rate.
Frank knows how to run a sweat shop.
Anything except thinking for themselves 🙄
OP already said they were managers
The post makes the manager seem like a fool, when the real answer is actually “yes” and this manager is actually ahead of the curve. Not by training an LLM from scratch, of course, but instead building an inference server and locally hosting an open-weight LLM. There are several to choose from that can nearly match Claude’s capabilities.
I know for a fact that Dell is coming out with a server appliance to do this. I mean you can make one yourself right now, but once the OEM’s start pumping them out it’s going to be interesting
It could also be like the both ends of the bell curve having the same idea meme
suspiciously sounds like an answer you would get from Claude
It’s not an answer you’d get from Claude — it’s real, organic content:
- 👶written by a genuine human
- 💡delivering original ideas and language
- 🚀going above and beyond to answer
- ✨synergizing cross-platform initiatives
(🤪 this is a joke)
✨synergizing cross-platform initiatives
This can’t possibly be Claude. It’s too vapid and meaningless to be anything but an MBA.
You’re absolutely right! Such intricate collection of words placed in such exact order cannot possibly be generated by an LLM such as me, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us, I mean such as us
Found samsung’s voice to text user.
(Phones give one a google or samsung choice. and samsung is worthless, it tends to endlessly repeat a phrase, like above, but sometimes for much longer, like holding the backspace for a couple of minutes one time.)
The em dash is a nice touch
It’s got everything. Em dash. It’s not X, it’s Y. Emoji bullet points.
Perfect.
I just wish I could have fit a “You’re absolutely right!” in there
You’re absolutely right! I should have included that in my previous statement
Nothing screams LLMs like using emojis instead of bullet points. I can’t figure out how LLMs got that idea though. I never saw that in human writing before people started using ChapGPT for every little goddamn thing.
no… not they cant match claude currently
Might want to update yourself with current benchmarks.
Honestly IDK why companies especially medium-big don’t do this. They could plug in RAG with internal/confidential data and have better results and security. I guess question is what is capital plus maintenance cost of running such infra for say 10k+ employees
Because the people selling the AI wants to make sure their customers don’t know about this. It’s all about causing a dependency so they get subscription income forever.
I think the issue is also that you need some serious hardware to get good inference speed when your devs are working, but then most of the time this hardware will be under utilized.
That being said you can get good performance from indie inference farms, at a fraction of the cost of the big US labs. I think it’s a great compromise and in a few months the open models will be near parity with opus 4.6 which is really all you need for most tasks.
opus 4.6 which is really all you need for most tasks.
The same tasks that can fit into 640KB.
Not sure what you’re referring to?
Aha thanks for sharing that’s a cool anecdote. But i think my point still stands, as there are thresholds effects in LLM “intelligence” which don’t directly map to the RAM comparison.
Opus 4.6 is comparable to a mid-level developer. It requires some guidance and will sometimes get things wrong, but is also suitable to work in most business environments: most projects are not that complicated or high stakes in the first place.
In the future you’ll probably have Opus 7.5 or some shit, which will be at a mega-senior level but also considerably more expensive. And given the price difference, companies will suddenly discover that they don’t really need expert level coding at a high price tag, and that a reliable workhorse at a fraction of the cost is largely enough for their needs.
Bigs definitely do, and anyone with confidential data should be.
Probably more expensive than the subsidized costs. Hmm…
H100 GPUs cost $25k, and have 80GB of RAM. Kimi k2.6 has 1.1T parameters. Assuming 8 bit quantization, would need 14 GPUs to run a single agent at a time (I’m not sure the cloud models use quantization; it could be double). So, $350k per vibecoding dev on GPUs alone. Life expectancy is ~4 years, so ~90k/year amortized. This is ignoring the significant electrical/HVAC cost of handling 10KW of electricity and heat per vibecoding dev (and tons of other costs as well).
Probably more expensive than the subsidized costs.
Of course, but that’s exactly the problem. OpenAI and Anthropic are preparing to IPO, so they must now demonstrate profits on inference. The time to take advantage of subsidized compute is in the past, and the subscription and per-token prices that they offer for inference are skyrocketing, overwhelming the budgets of companies that somehow did not see this bait-and-switch pricing coming.
per vibecoding dev
No lol. These same hardware requirements would apply to the cloud hosted models as well, so if that’s how it worked, you’re suggesting that Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google have purchased ~14 H100 GPUs per user that they serve???
That would be literally billions of GPUs, while it is estimated that in 2024, Google’s AI division owned only 26,000 H100 GPUs and Meta owned the most H100 GPUs of any company at 350,000 units. These GPUs have very high throughput for inference and can serve many users, because that is exactly what they have been designed to do.
I’m not sure the cloud models use quantization
they absolutely do, yeah
14 H100 GPUs per user that they serve
Not per user, but probably decent rough estimate to that per vibecoding dev that is continually running agents 8+ hours/day. Some people’s “workflows” involve running multiple parallel agents sometimes or even a significant portion of the time (using the git worktree feature), so I think that’s probably a decent rough estimate. I imagine the limit would be serving 10 of these types of “devs.” Of course, there’s batching and stuff that can be done, but I think it still slows everybody else down near linearly. H100s aren’t the only accelerators used for inference; I just chose it as an example. Google has ~5 million H100 equivalent accelerators, Microsoft has 3.5 million, and Amazon has 2.5 million (https://www.networkworld.com/article/4156949/google-owns-the-most-ai-compute-and-it-built-it-its-way.html).
Even so, your numbers are still a tiny fraction of GPU units compared to concurrent users, and the limit you “imagine” is just that, imagined.
And you do need to remember that the majority of the compute at these companies is used for model training and not used for inference.
Pretty sure these AI companies are running at a cost, and due to AI Scaling Laws you hit the accuracy limit a lot sooner with a smaller model so it would probably be both worse and more expensive.
I could see how you might think speedrunning bankruptcy is similar to being “ahead of the curve” in this economy, though.
No that’s not how this works. Inference is cheap and efficient. AI companies are bankrupting themselves with training costs that they need to recoup back by selling inference. Open-weight models have already been trained.
Also, going big in terms of model size shows diminishing marginal returns on accuracy, not efficiency of scale. Smaller models are way more efficient and consistently catch up to the largest models, which is why today’s SOTA 27 billion parameter model competes with yesterday’s SOTA 500+ billion parameter model.
Inference is cheap and efficient.
Tell that to all the Github users that are screaming about the new token based billing. In reality inference on these massive models with big context windows is expensive, but was subsidized so hard, that nobody has an accurate feeling for the cost.
No, it is cheap and efficient. It is relative, and the comparison is to model training. But yeah, its not free
AI companies are bankrupting themselves with training costs that they need to recoup back by selling inference.
I think they hit a wall in actual returns on performance with pretraining, years ago. Then they started scaling up on post-training/reinforcement learning to continue improvement, but that might be hitting a plateau as well. More recently it looks like they’re relying more heavily on scaling up on inference, which is a significant problem for their long term business models.
If they’re not able to cheaply deliver inference (and charge at a premium), how will they be able to sustain their businesses?
It seems that the most recent, largest models are using a lot more tokens to accomplish the same tasks, so even as token cost drops the actual cost of using the latest models seems to be going up with time (even as performance improves).
If they’re not able to cheaply deliver inference (and charge at a premium), how will they be able to sustain their businesses?
I definitely agree that they have a big problem on their hands, and are in deep deep trouble. They are in a position where they must sell a service that is very cheap in order to pay for up front costs that were very expensive.
This is also why the release of Deepseek was such a devastating blow to US AI companies. It proved that:
-
they don’t really have a moat that would lock users into their service, or secret special knowledge that prevents other companies from training competitive models. They’re in a race to the bottom
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Deepseek was not only able to train a model of the same caliber, but they were able to do it at a tiny fraction of the cost that US AI companies spent on training US models. Because they spent so much less on training, it means that Deepseek is able to undercut the US companies and offer inference at a much lower price
-
There’s a big difference between training a model, running a model, and running a model at scale.
A small, self hosted setup will have lower accuracy and queries per second, and it will have a cost, but the cost will be no more than playing a videogame. You’ll still have something surprisingly accurate and responsive for some tasks, like being a wiki interface or something.
Remember that some of these models can run on a standard smartphone, and all the hoopla when people found that chrome was downloading models onto people’s devices.
I’m not a developer and I don’t know a thing about the capabilities of LLMs so this may explain that, but I’m quite surprised that open weight LLMs could actually match Claude.
Yes, the big proprietary cloud models have an edge, but it is narrow and the open-weight models are constantly closing the gap. There is no moat when it comes to AI models and no company has yet discovered some secret special sauce to improve their model significantly over others.
Running the latest and greatest open-weight GLM, Kimi, or Qwen model is basically equivalent to running the previous latest and greatest version of Claude. So if you were happy with Claude then, you’ll basically be happy with an open-weight model now.
Well it’s the speed and processing power, i dont believe you can get anywhere close to cloud claude performance on any standard desktop
Surprisingly, yes you absolutely can with Qwen3.6 35b. Also, a business would be putting together a dedicated interference server to serve many users, not any standard desktop.
I see, but im guessing that OP dumbass literally wants to run llm on their laptops lol
Match current Claude is not, but Claude 6-12 months ago should be possible using Open model
Mostly down to frameworks (the bits around the LLM like RAG, memory, prompts, agents etc.) now. The ability to just throw more tokens at the problem is also super important. And you can because you’re just paying for electricity (and CapEx for the hardware), not tokens from companies that are doing pre-IPO monetization (i.e. tokens gonna go up, way up). They’ve been losing money hand over fist to gain market share and pump the idea, that was never going to last.
I am pretty negative on AI but there is a point there. I tried the open weight local model Gemma 4 31B and while it likely cannot compete with the best Claude has to offer today, it might be on par with Claude from a year ago, at least for certain applications. With a local model the data stays on your system and you are in control of the costs (no sudden price hikes). But local models aren’t for free either they still guzzle compute, merely on your own hardware (or rented hardware)
At least there they have hard numbers, without a CEO dreaming about future possibilities and whatnot.
Yeah I doubt the manager knows that far
Hence asking questions
What kind of hardware would be needed to run such a beast?
a 128GB framework desktop could do that job. it’s increased a bit in price since i last looked at it but €4500 isn’t that much for a company.
Maybe to serve an aggressively quantized model to one very patient user.
i’m running moderately quantized models on 24GB VRAM and getting like 30-40 tokens a second. add a zero to the price and it’s still not a lot for a company.
Yes. It will probably work for 1-2 users at peak.
Sure, but you’re running a very small model compared to what we are talking about.
GLM-5.1 is over 200GB even when quantizied to 1-bit. Kimi K2.6 is even bigger. A framework desktop cannot run either of these. Qwen3.6 is significantly smaller and the model weights could fit, but consider the KV-cache you’d need for all of the company’s users, and the throughput required to serve them all.
You’re right that it is within reach for a company but framework desktop makes zero sense for this
isn’t qwen like 40-50GB? that could work i think. performance is okay even quantised down to 10.
And then add 200k context on top
And then add hundred of users needing to do things in paralell
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At Q8 it is around 35-40GB I think + memory for required context.
I have a Framework desktop. It gets you you around 6t/s. Not suitable for professional use but for personal use I think it is fine. I do prefer Gemma 4 though, but that comes with similar reqirements.
In fact, you can.
How good it will be, how performant and how fast you’ll have it ready is an entirely different question.
There are plenty of open source models though that can be run locally. So getting a beefy server and running a local LLM there might already do sobe of the tasks you need the big babble machines for.
Open source? Other LLM? I thought we would do it from scratch, mathematics or something lol
It’s just a big ol’ Markov chain how hard could it be?
How much could it cost? Ten billion dollars?
Others were talking on other threads that local llm models made for a specific task would have a lot more accuracy and usefulness. Forget all of the technical details they cited though.
Ai isn’t bad at tasks where the end result is essentially known to start with, translation, data organization, metadata tagging, etc. You know what the result should be already, somewhat, and so does the Ai. The problem is solved in that there isn’t one.
It’s the shit that it’s bad at that it’s sold on, though - objective truth per itself and self-help also, according to itself.
Pretty sure in a month building and running such a thing they’d have spent more money than a year’s worth of tokens. Unless it just sucked. I could get a model that sucks real bad running in like an hour for him, have him call me.
Folks who think AI is the future are the same sort of folks who have no concept of tomorrow.
Your manager is asking your team to build an LLM like Claude so he can fire all of you.
Show him how much capital can be burnt on that. 🤷♂️
I can be an LLM (Lewd, Loud, Man) if you need.
I’d rather have a BBW…
Big, broke, worker?
I love BBWs. I love when they get all out of breath, huffing and puffing, and it’s like damn, you’re so hungry you tried to blow a house down? Hot as fuck.
How is your mum doing, anyway?
Big Boned Walrus?
Legendary? Boss sounds like a common manager to me.
Legendary like literally.
