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0 pointsmchiang7mo ago0 comments

When we started Ollama, we were told how open-source (open-weight wasn't a term back then) will always be inferior to the close-sourced models. This was 2 years ago (Ollama's birthday is July 18th, 2023).

Fast forward to now, open models are quickly catching up, and at a significantly lower price point for most and can be customized for specific tasks instead of being general purpose. For general purpose models, absolutely the closed models are currently dominating.

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typpilol7mo ago

Ya a lot of ppl don't realize you could spend 2k on a 5090 to run some of the large models.

Or spend 20 a month for models even a 5090 couldn't run. And not have to spend your own electricity, hardware, maintenance, updates etc.

oytis7mo ago

20 a month for a commercial model is price dumping financed by investors. For ollama it's hopefully a sustainable price.

theshrike797mo ago

The 20 a month models definitely aren't sustainable.

This is why everyone needs to get every flavour and speedrun building all the tools they need when the infinite money faucets are turned off.

At some point companies will start raising prices or moving towards per-token pricing (Which is sustainable, but expensive).

gunalx7mo ago

Depends. API pricing from oss model inference providers basically has to be sustainable, because of competition in the space.

And with that in mind, i definetly dont use more than a couple of bucks a month in API refils. (not that i really am a power user or anything)

So if you consider the 20 bucks to be balanced between poer and non power users, and with the existing rate limits, its probably not that far off being profitable, at least on the pure inference side.

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