That's what their PR material seems to imply.
> Have you tried building things with this stuff?
Yes.
> it's exciting, there's all kinds of new things to build
Yes, and no. I don't want to pay to build, or be dependent on an API or model delivery. It means I want to build the juicy stuff, the models themselves. Generate synthetic data, experiment with different approaches for training, etc. That is way outside the reach of common people (it can't be done now, you need lots of money).
I also don't want to buy a fancy GPU so early. Even the most expensive ones are currently very weak to do anything of real value. I could run some inference or adjust some weights, but I would still be at the mercy of some company delivering me base models.
The prices are all inflated because of the hype, and it seems AI companies are synchronizing this inflation with the hardware companies. I'm betting on this pricing bubble to pop.
Regarding the stuff I can do with already pre-trained models, there's not much to learn. In its core, it's basically the same good old stitching of APIs (I've been doing this for decades). I tried using the AI IDEs, but didn't found much value in them. I'm sure they're great for some scenarios, but it's more of a gimmick to use developers to generate training data than anything else.
Regarding "agents" and stuff, I have zero interest in competing in this "user of model" market. It's so easy to do, that any new idea is flooded with attempts and saturates in mere weeks.
When the opportunity to build something _really_ cool and novel appears, I'll give it a real chance. The race between big tech competitors is killing those opportunities for now, only people hired by big AI companies get to do it, and I'm not one of them.
I've self hosted everything except training, I've been using colab for that, not because it's faster (it isn't) but because the heat is awful.
Before, Google would launch a new Android version. Or Facebook would launch React, and developers would flock en masse to the ecosystem and the new features. These are very low-barrier entry ecosystems. All you need is a cheap computer or phone, which you probably already have for other reasons.
I get the impression that this is not happening with AI tech. Whoever is flocking to these is not contributing much to improve the ecosystem. There's a lot of users, but they're not doing anything interesting, and it's not getting the traction they expected.
I could be wrong, but I think I'm on the right track on this one. High-value collaborators know that they can jump in at any time, there's nothing really special about it that requires the early investment, and currently there is no clear reward for being an early adopter.
Have you tried building things with this stuff? I have, it's exciting, there's all kinds of new things to build. I haven't been as excited to build things for a while before this.