Apple does this and it's obvious that they do it to use the "decoy effect" when customers want to shop. Why purchase a measly regular iPhone when you can spend a little more and get the Pro version?
But when it comes to AI, this tierification only leads to disappointment—everyone expects the best models from the FAANGO (including OpenAI), no one expects Google or OpenAI to offer shitty models that underperform their flagships when you can literally run Llama 2 and Mistral models that you can actually own.
They're tiers of computing power and memory. More performance costs more money to produce. The "nano" can fit on a phone, while the others can't.
Are you really objecting to the existence of different price/performance tiers...? Do you object to McDonald's selling 3 sizes of soft drink? There's nothing "decoy" about any of this.
Yes, actually, for different reasons - McDonald’s charges only a tiny bit more for the largest size of drink than they do for the smallest (which is easy because soft drinks are a few cents’ worth of syrup and water, and the rest is profit). That pushes people toward huge drinks, which means more sugar, more caffeine, and more addiction.
Unless you expect Apple to just sell the high end devices at a loss? Or do you want the high end chips to be sold in the mass market devices and for Apple to just eat the R&D costs?
Usually it’s the other way around. Mass market products have thin margins and are subsidized by high end / B2B products because the customers for those products have infinitely deep pockets.
> Or do you want the high end chips to be sold in the mass market devices and for Apple to just eat the R&D costs?
Literally what Steve Jobs was steadfast in :). One iPhone for everyone. He even insisted on the Plus models carrying no extra features.
That's usually what I've seen, but the M1 MacBook Air came out first and the M1 Pro and Max came out much later.
Large AI models have tight resources requirements. You physically can't use X billion parameters without ~X billion ~bytes of memory.
It makes complete sense to have these 3 "tiers". You have a max capability option, a price-performance scaling option, and an edge compute option.
Well, X billion bits times the parameter bit size. For base models, those are generally 32-bit (so 4X bytes), though smaller quantizations ate possible and widely used for public models, and I would assume as a cost measure for closed hosted models as well.
IMO, Tiers can be useful when they make sense and aren't just for artificial market segmentation.
