u/warpaint_james

Spotted this in my regular sleuthing of the ShadPS4 fork network.

Looks like a different approach to running the ShadPS4 core on Android. I tried on my Odin 3 and it wasn’t working.

There was this: https://github.com/Tersonous/shandroidPS4 but it seems to be abandoned as dell as the forks.

Anyone got any insight on this or tried it out?

There is a tech/web developer podcast called Syntax. They are developers, using it for development things, and are quite honest about when it sucks or what it can/can't or shouldn't do. As well as being aware that making a CSS change with an LLM is dumb and expensive. I wouldn’t call them shills but they get value out of the tools.

Yesterday, they released this episode and they talk to the guy who runs the team that created OpenCode: https://syntax.fm/show/1021/we-got-addicted-to-an-ai-model-we-can-t-talk-about/transcript

OpenCode, is a "harness" for various LLM models and providers. It allows you to jump around to different ones and doesn’t lock you in. It is built and run by actual developers (they have pre-AI products they sell) and is not just the crap-on-crap glue-and-stick harness like you see from some of the other anus-logo'd companies.

There are other companies that have used OpenCode as a base to create their own harnesses. So it is quite well known and "respected".

They don’t make money on OpenCode directly. However, they do have an inference company called OpenCode Zen: https://opencode.ai/zen

They sell inference, and when you use OpenCode, it is likely you will use their Zen service to get access to models. They resell access to the big ones (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, etc.) but they also sell inference for popular open models from the Chinese labs. They also have a generous free tier.

I gave the preamble because Dax, the interviewee, has first hand knowledge on selling inference. He is transparent that they have a middle-man company, and that they are able to offer the pricing they do and still have good margins.

With that, he talks about the profits on inference. Here are a few quotes from the interview:

https://youtu.be/oDUBsE09n5c?si=wUR0DX3epZ1UTlnn&t=1763

> These prices are going to come down and can come down a lot. Like if you are price sensitive, these open source models are just way cheaper. > I think this is confusing to people because there's a lot of headlines about OpenAI and Anthropic just lose money and like they're never going to be successful, but margins on inference are like insane right now. Especially because Open AI and Anthropic are increasing prices. > I'm estimating they probably make 90% margin on their inference which means break even could be 10x cheaper.

https://youtu.be/oDUBsE09n5c?si=s-08OyuTFNSJm7NG&t=1881

> Just to kind of give you guys a fewer numbers. So again because we are an inference provider we see some of these details. > We still use middlemen. Despite using middleman for hosting our GPUs there are some models that we are able to offer at sticker price. > And that's with a middleman involved. So if you directly spend the capital to acquire the GPUs, > you can probably hit those like 90% margins that I'm estimating for Anthropic which means like cost is very very cheap. Yeah. But again these are for open source models. > So we we still have to rely on those getting better.

I have seen/heard him say this before but that was probably a year ago. Seeing him say this again now makes me wonder if it is really true.

If not, what is the incentive to say this? If yes, then where is the "no one is profitable on inference" story coming from? Sounds more like some companies are not profitable on inference.

It is possible that the guy who sells inference is wrong. I am hesitant to assume that.

It feels more likely that the story about margins on inference are more nuanced than "it cannot, and never will, make money".

So am I missing something here? I just don’t see a reason for this guy in particular to say this. If anything he is incentivized to say that their inference is great and you should use it and not that his prices will crash to a tenth of their cost soon.

It can be tough to keep up with all the forks going around. PS2 seems especially popular these days so there are like 3 or 4 different projects and then forks of those are floating around.

I’ve been using this one and have been really happy with it. Just wanted to share to make sure it gets some attention