It’s somewhat exciting to see the commodification of AI models and hardware. At first I was concerned that the hyperscalers would just own the whole thing as a service that keeps squeezing you.
But if model development and self hosting become financially feasible for the majority of organizations then this might really be a “democratized” productivity boost.
The hyperscalers will always own the best models, and even if you're willing to excuse that, requiring organization-levels of funding to run a decent model locally hardly makes the tech "democratized". Sure, you'll always be able to run ${LOCAL_MODEL} on your personal hardware, but that might be akin to programming using Notepad if the gap with the best models in the market is wide enough.
> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).
