alt Hacker News> Agents don't leave
How wrong the author is about that! IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering
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> IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering
It's worse than you state; a primary premise of the current AI expansion and investment, continuously repeated, is that computational resources are increasing for the same price-point.
So tell me, when we have these hardware gains in 5 years, why the fuck would I pay for fractionally better output on a cloud subscription when I could run on-prem GPUs for a fraction of what the actual subscription would be, giving me 24x7 agents working with no limit?
Current highly-invested AI providers are token providers - they are sitting at the bottom of the value-chain. They are trying to climb the value-chain, but the real value is in the models, and since all models have mostly converged on the same performance, running your own gives a very tiny drop in value.
Their problem is that, even at $200/m, it is not feasible to offer 24x7 access to the models - that max subscription has tiny limits: on that subscription you most definitely are not enabling even a single agent to run f/time.
You might get 3 hours per day, maybe. Best case, you get half a working day (4 hours), for five days. So double the subscription, and you're still looking at only a single simply agent that you can run f/time for $400/m.
For collaborating agents, you'll have, what, 4 - 5 diving into a large task in parallel? That's maybe $1600/m - $2000/m to solve tasks. You still have to pay the (increasingly incompetent) human operator to manage them.
That sort of workflow is what is being sold as the vision, and yet that will only be economically viable if you're self-hosting your own model.
But local agents will still keep working. Of course they're not as poweful as an acre of industrially cooled compute power, but still a massive improvement over "Intellisense" and code snippets.
You're 100% right though, you shouldn't build your business on top of an AI service and not have a plan what to do _when_ it either goes away or just prices itself out. It's a massive bubble where money is just moving in a circle.