What good is high market share in a market that’s well on its way to being killed off for good?

Retail users have - unfortunately - neither the disposable income nor the political will to compete with the billionaires driving this development.

Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.

People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.

The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.

Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.

Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.

Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

We don’t need them even without local inference. There was already more than enough total global compute for the most valuable use cases of LLMs (research, development, admin). The datacenter build-up is almost entirely fueled by utterly unrealistic expectations of future capabilities. Before and now the case for local inference is a matter of access, not capacity.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Utilitarianism like this is a disease. By the same logic, it’s inefficient that we allow other species of animals to exist and consume usable energy. Hell, why stop at other species? It’s inefficient to allow humans to exist - let’s kill all humans!

Now, I know that’s not what he said, the point was to show that when someone uses utilitarianism as a serious argument, they are no longer worth listening to.

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

The supply is only constrained because you keep hoarding more than you need. Maybe it’s time for some communization? So communities where data centers are built get most if not all of the profits from it?