Hotz: Shift to diffusion AI models will erode centralized cloud moats
George Hotz · Weekly Recap: Elon's Starship Explodes, OpenAI's Defense Contract, Nvidia's Robots, We Test Cluely · Jun 21, 2025 · at 2:19:17
George Hotz, founder of Tiny Corp and comma.ai, compares batch-size economics between autoregressive models and diffusion architectures.
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“With AI, I think there's going to be a much less of a moat. Especially when you look at the move from autoregression to diffusion. So autoregression can run in large batch sizes. When you run ChatGPT, you're running with a whole bunch of other people on that same computer. It's only a hundred. It's not 10,000, but still it's a hundred. Diffusion is running the cloud at batch size one. And once you're in batch size one land, running it locally starts to make sense. Actually running the models locally, or at least having your own computer in the cloud. Not being some shared resource that's really controlled by somebody else.”
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