I've been diving deep into whether to go for self-hosted LLM models (like open-source GPT variants) or stick to API-based solutions like OpenAI's GPT-4.
Here's what I've found so far:
- API Costs: Generally straightforward—pay per usage. OpenAI's GPT-4 API pricing is around $0.06/1k tokens for generations. Costs scale linearly with use but can get expensive with high volume.
- Self-hosted Setup: Initial setup for models like GPT-J or LLaMA isn't trivial. Consider compute costs, like an 8-GPU instance, which AWS offers at around $25/hour. In addition, there's the headaches around ML Ops and ensuring uptime.
- Maintenance & Updates: API providers continuously optimize and update their models. Self-hosting requires dedicated resources to update and maintain the model yourself.
- Data Privacy: Self-hosting might offer more control over data privacy, whereas using APIs necessitates trust in the LLM provider's data policies.
Has anyone done a detailed cost-benefit analysis or can share their experiences? How do you handle maintenance overheads and updates for self-hosted systems? I'd love to hear some war stories or success stories!
P.S. Any handy cost calculators or spreadsheets would be appreciated!
