alt Hacker NewsAt 50tps for single stream you are going to get 50 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 130M out tokens of GLM 5.3 Flash...
That's less than what 40$ at current API rates... So if you are willing to pay 200$ per month you will get much better limits paying API rates.
You can't run large Kimi K3 models on 10K worth of hardware either way, you need to spend like 50K USD minimum.
Just pay for the API rates or get a low cost provider that uses higher batching, you can get shittier tps but much better prices, probably go as low as 20$ for as much usage as you can ever get from a 10K USD machine from GLM 5.3 Flash...
The issue is nothing expensive runs on these devices and cheap stuff isn't worth running locally, eletricity costs ~12cents/kwh in us iirc, so at 330W M5 Ultra will burn around 8 * 0.12 = ~1$ per day extra in electricity so the electricity is going to cost you the same as the API rates(30$ per month).
I truly don't think you are accounting for the costs here properly. But again if money truly doesn't matter it's much better for privacy and better than paying one of the shady AI labs who are doing god knows what with your data.
Your point isn't lost on me, but a few other considerations:
1) Rates are theoretically discounted for GLM 5.3 Flash right now, by 50%.
2) Hardware costs have continued ascending with no sign of letting off, so it's unlikely that a DGX Spark depreciates to zero in one year.
3) Compare performance in terms of difficult tasks/$ over the last 6 months, 3 months, etc. Open weights are a ratchet. In terms of intelligence per $, a Spark is never going to be a worse deal tomorrow than it is today, at least until the entire platform is replaced or obsoleted.
71 days ago the best model you could run on two Sparks was an aggressive Q3 quant of Qwen 3.5 397B (AA 34). 70 days ago it was a mixed-quant of GLM 5.2 (AA 53). 30 days ago it was full fat DeepSeek 4 Flash (AA 53). Today it's GLM 5.3 Flash (AA57) and/or Qwen 3.8 Next (Unknown). Sometime this week it will likely become mixed-quant GLM 5.3 (AA 60).
So in < 80 days we have almost doubled the benchmark score. And that curve is still accelerating. If you view it as "cost per token of model vs API" then yes it's a bad deal. If you view it as "cost of task per $" then it has almost doubled in value in less than 3 months. All of this, imo, API and hardware, is still massively underpriced.