Yes. People keep thinking that Chinese models are free or near free for some reason.

In reality, they're raising prices too. I was looking at Kimi K3 prices on OpenRouter and it's nearly the same as Anthropic and OpenAI.

Buy an M5 max for $4k and you have a portable Deepseek 0731 for life.

But it won't last for life. It will probably last about 4 years so that equates to about 100/mo.

M1 is finishing it's 6th year of life and going strong ...

Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads? Do you have any idea how much electricity it uses over it those 4 years?

You cannot wear out an SSD through AI inference alone. LLM weights are only read from the SSD, and read operations do not contribute to SSD wear. SSD wear is primarily caused by write and erase operations.

> Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads?

Your other point is valid, but you're either vastly underestimating how many reads/writes a modern SSD can take or vastly overestimating how much output a typical LLM is capable of.

models are stuck in time. eventually the world moves forward and it is trained on too much obsolete data.

training cannot end for LLMs intrinsically. it's not some fixed cost. it's an ongoing one.

> eventually the world moves forward and it is trained on too much obsolete data.

This is why LLMs are never going to be AGI. Humans don’t become obsolete just because they age.

Humans do die eventually though, which is an even more severe form of obsolescense. I don't think they'll be AGI either, but that argument doesn't seem super compelling.

On the other hand you have the old saying "science advances one funeral at a time", indicating death solves at least as many problems as it causes.

(the point being that old, powerful professors have more than once blocked progress in their fields for decades. And only a funeral, eventually, solves the problem ...)