No amount of valuation can fix global supply issues for GPUs for inference unfortunately.
I suspect they're highly oversubscribed, thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
Wouldn't that be good? I remember back in the day you could only get Gmail thru an invite, it was an awesome strategy. "Currently closed for applications" creates FOMO. They'd just need to actually get the GPUs in relatively short supply. They could do it in bursts though, right? "Now accepting applications for a short time."
I'm not an internet marketer but that sounds like a win win to me. People feel special, they get extra hype, and the service isn't broken.
Are you sure it was fake scarcity for Gmail? IIRC they did it because they were worried about systems falling over if it grew too fast, and discovered the marketing benefits as a side effect.
I didn't. Anthropic and others followed the concept of scaling up models and worry about efficiency and availability later. Sam likely didn't invent the idea but he talked about it.
maybe, but the response to GPU shortages being increased error rates is the concern imo. they could implement queuing or delayed response times. it's been long enough that they've had plenty of time to implement things like this, at least on their web-ui where they have full control. instead it still just errors with no further information.
i notice that as well. most of the time when i see those it has a retry counter also and i can see it trying and failing multiple requests haha. almost never succeeds in producing a response when i see those though, eventually just errors out completely.
That implies that either the auth is too heavy (possible, ish) or their systems don't degrade gracefully enough and many different types of failures propagate up and out all the way to their outermost layer, ie. auth (more plausible).
Disclosure: I have scars from a distributed system where errors propagated outwards and took down auth...
> thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).
The dynamic thinking and response length is funny enough the best upgrade I've experienced with the service for more than a year. I really appreciate that when I say or ask something simple the answer now just comes back as a single sentence without having to manually toggle "concise" mode on and off again.
I suspect they're highly oversubscribed, thus the reason why we're seeing them do other things to cut down on inference cost (ie changing their default thinking length).