$7,600 a month from a rack that replaced a $290 subscription.
In the four days since I posted this, 21 different small print shop owners DMed Derek with the same question: how to build the same setup for themselves.
That $290 cloud service is still billing someone else for the exact same model analysis right now, while in Seattle that bill closed for good.
One more year of this and the companies selling model analysis as a subscription will be selling nothing but air.
A 31 year old owner of a small 3D printing shop in Seattle was paying $290 a month for an AI service that optimized print settings for every model.
Today a rack of boards on his desk brings him $7,600 a month instead of that bill.
His name is Derek.
For two years he uploaded every client's STL file to a cloud service that calculated layer thickness, speed, and supports, paying for each analysis separately.
He built a handful of compute boards into an open frame with 3D printed mounts of his own design.
It connects through a PoE switch and a patch panel right on the desk next to the printers.
The $290 a month cloud service is gone completely.
The whiteboard behind him still has an old print-time calculation in pencil: blade 2h45m, spring 5h, handle 7h30m, total 15 hours, the same kind of math he now feeds into the local model instead.
In its place, he's taking on twice as many custom print orders as he could before, $7,600 last month.
Anyone still paying per model analysis is paying for what already sits on a desk next to the printer in Seattle.
@yurshevv Minsky's Society of Mind argued intelligence emerges from many simple non-intelligent agents interacting, which is basically what modern multi-agent systems are rediscovering decades later
MIT gave Marvin Minsky a room and two hours to destroy one idea: that intelligence is a real thing.
His answer was simple. Smart is just the word we use for whatever we cannot explain yet.
A mind is not one clever thing. It is hundreds of small dumb parts with no boss and no center. Somehow it works.
He taught this at MIT until 2016, the year he died. That lecture has 1.6 million views.
Almost nobody here has watched it. Everyone building AI today chases one big brain.
Minsky spent 50 years saying that is the wrong goal. What part of modern
AI feels most wrong to you? Or what old idea about intelligence still shapes how you think? Drop your take below.
@Durektor97 Chaining Claude Fable 5 for structure, ChatGPT for prompt refinement, and Higgsfield MCP for media generation into one pipeline is a legit no-code stack, not just a demo
$7,600 a month from a rack that replaced a $290 subscription.
In the four days since I posted this, 21 different small print shop owners DMed Derek with the same question: how to build the same setup for themselves.
That $290 cloud service is still billing someone else for the exact same model analysis right now, while in Seattle that bill closed for good.
One more year of this and the companies selling model analysis as a subscription will be selling nothing but air.