What Will You Do When AI runs Out of Money and Disappear?

> it's the running costs of these major AI services that are also astronomical

There's wildly different reports about whether the cost of just inference (not the training) is expensive or not...

Sam Altman has said “We’re profitable on inference. If we didn’t pay for training, we’d be a very profitable company.”

But a lot of folks are convinced that inference prices are currently being propped up by burning through investor capital?

I think if we look at open source model hosting then it's pretty convincing - Look at say https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-4.7 . There's about 10 different random API providers that are competing on price and they'll serve GLM 4.7 tokens at around $1.50 - $2.50 per output Mtokens. (which by the way is a tenth of the cost of Opus 4.5)

I seriously doubt that all these random services that no one has ever heard of are also being propped up by investor capital. It seems more likely that $1.50 - $2.50 is the "near cost" price.

If that's the actual cost, and considering that the open source models like GLM are still pretty useful when used correctly, then it's pretty clear that AI is here to stay.

I dunno, GPT-OSS and Llama and QWEN and any half dozen of other large open-weight models?

I really can't imagine OpenAI or Anthropic turning off inference for a model that my workplace is happy to spend >$200*person/month on. Google still has piles of cash and no reason to turn off Gemini.

The thing is, if inference is truly heavily subsidized (I don't think it is, because places like OpenRouter charge less than the big players for proportionally smaller models) then we'd probably happily pay >$500 a month for the current frontier models if everyone gave up on training new models because of some oddball scaling limit.

As a business in our current age you are stuck in a valley between two wildly different risks.

1. AI disappears, goes up in price, etc. All the money you've spent goes up in smoke, or you have to spend a lot more money to keep the engine running.

2. AI does not disappear, becomes cheaper and eats your businesses primary revenue generation for lunch.

Number 1 could happen tomorrow. Number 1 could happen after number 2. Number 1 may never happen.

Also expect that even if the AI market crashes that AI has already massively changed the economy, and that at least some investment will go into making AI more efficient and at any point number 2 could spring out of nowhere yet again.

Missing Option 3) hardware and software continue to evolve and AI becomes cost efficient at the same price and eventually even lower

Finally buy a new PC.

The author may have a point, but the handwavy numbers read as if he has no idea how accounting works. Seems like he doesn't understand capex vs opex and how they influence profitability (and their cashflow effects)

I've never used AI except for messing around with Stable Diffusion in its early days (my then-current graphics card didn't have enough ram to run it), played with it a bit after an upgrade and that was it.

Never used a LLM or anything explicitly.

Got annoyed when I had to deal with AI chatbots as front-line customer service - although that only happened once or twice in the last couple of months.

So basically, keep doing what I'm doing.

I like AI for specifically targeted applications: - e.g. 100,000+ AI "eyeballs" vs. a few 100 for diagonstic imaging, working out whether there's something to worry about or not. I hate the idea of generalised AI, LLM's etc.

Lowering the bar to enable 'creative output' from non-creative individuals just fucks up the world, because natural talent is replaced by unnatural talent, especially in (late) capitalism, where money is worth more than human experience to those few control-freak managers.

I'm old. I even earnt enough to buy a house with lawn over 4 years ago during my (pre-AI) career as a Software Developer. Get off my damn lawn.

Training is the expensive part here. It seems much more likely that the training of these models slows down drastically and is written off as a sunk cost, a few companies continue running inference on years-old models, and the free versions go away.

Buy ram

Try to buy some ram and cheap used computer parts hopefully