zlacker

>>laurex+(OP)
These perverse incentives run at the heart of almost all Developer Software as a Service tooling. Using someone else's hosted model incentivizes increasing token usage, but it's nothing special about AI.

Consider Database-as-a-service companies: They're not incentivized to optimize on CPU usage, they charge per cpu. They're not incentivized to improve disk compression, they charge for disk-usage. There are several DB vendors who explicitly disable disk compression and happily charge for storage capacity.

When you run the software yourself, or the model yourself, the incentives aligned: use less power, use less memory, use less disk, etc.

>>erulab+zj
My favourite example of this is the recent trend towards “wide events” replacing logs and metrics… spearheaded and popularised by companies that charge by the gigabytes ingested.