@Pearticle@kyfriedfella@matt503ea5sf9z5 Not really. Distillation requires WORK - time in code and dev and GPU / compute time. Plus costs of using the API to distill from.
@benjamin_horne Calculate for yourself how much it costs to run deepseek or Kiki full-size and explain to me how it’s a “fraction of the price” compared to API costs ?
@kyfriedfella@matt503ea5sf9z5 It doesn’t matter if they distilled, they were able to further reduce the loss function and teach the model something. That’s what machine learning is, so either way they created novel development.
@apnmrev Product was NEVER the hard part. All college students / unemployed would have been printing money by your logic. It’s always and forever marketing and only marketing.
@samueljmcd Yep. The way I look at it, API pricing is likely in my eyes to be wildly profitable for them. I would not be surprised to hear about 80% margins. Subscription pricing is probably still profitable, factoring that many users underperform, and caching
@samueljmcd Right but we can’t see the subscription plan costing - I.e actual compute cost to the provider vs actual subscription usage. So we just really don’t know