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# Introduction
What is the plan things Like what do electricity, wheat, mobile phone and internet have in common? Arguably, for many, they have become what we call GoodsThat is, “a resource or good that has full or substantial substitutability (or is simply deemed essential to modern lifestyles).”
Most of the examples mentioned became objects at particular junctures in history. For example, in the late ’90s, mobile phones were still an emerging novelty – at least, as far as I remember. Yet in the present century, who can imagine living without it?
Fast forward to the present time, and looking at the language model technological wave that has come into our lives over the last 3 to 4 years, this article analyzes a set of objective facts. Added to this are some personal thoughts on the following question: Are language models a new thing that we can no longer live without?
# review of facts
Just a few years ago, an advanced language model was considered a luxury technical asset, but today it has become a ubiquitous solution that many organizations can no longer afford.
There are several facts about the current market reality that explain this widespread reach of language models:
- Falling costs: This may seem counterintuitive in the modern global context of rising prices for almost everything, but one exception to this norm is the cost of “raw intelligence” solutions. An example is the cost of processing one million tokens (about 750K words) in the Frontier model, which used to cost tens of dollars even a few years ago, but can now cost tens of dollars. st.
- Free access revolution: Open-weight models have contributed to breaking the specificity barrier. Language model families such as Meta’s Llama or Mistral have demonstrated, based on public benchmarks, that they can perform on par with or better than many commercial alternatives.
- Zero Cost: Nowadays, any user can download free language modeling tools like Olama and execute highly capable models locally on their machine. This completely eliminates the need for paid subscriptions or API quota usage, as well as reliance on third-party services. As a result, AI accessibility as a basic and free resource has become the new standard.
“For example, in the late ’90s, the mobile phone was still an emerging novelty – at least, as far as I remember. Yet in the current century, who can imagine living without it?”
# Exploring fact-based ideas
Basic AI capabilities may become a commodity, but having a model with its own “personality” that goes the extra mile with complex, nuanced tasks may not be seen that way yet. Many foundation models – which are fundamental from an upstream, general-purpose perspective, and which represent the initial, large-scale pre-training step before a model is optimized for specific tasks – can generate text responses or code for free, but there is still a noticeable difference between a human’s natural narrative and a model’s conversational style, sometimes still a little robotic and predictable in the words and expressions it uses. Many of the outputs generated by these models still require final refinement, and this is the differentiating factor across different domains.
On another note, many users don’t invest in the models themselves, but rather in the experience that comes with them. It’s great to have a free text generation engine on our own computers, but businesses need to charge for solutions in which that model has been refined to interact with your documents, code or workflow in a specific way. We are still relatively far from the point where everyone will fully accept delegating this work to (often paid) language model solutions rather than doing it themselves.
# pass Judgement
Based on the facts, almost free from how the role of language models and access to them have evolved in recent years, we can think that these factors have led such models to become the new object of the current decade. But there are still other aspects, such as reliability, fully guaranteed privacy, and adaptation to specific application domains (such as medical or legal reasoning), that are still not within everyone’s reach. premium price Goods, and making the term “commodity” a bit debatable in the landscape of language models.
ivan palomares carrascosa Is a leader, author, speaker and consultant in AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and LLM. He trains and guides others in using AI in the real world.
