alt Hacker NewsAI plans are not going to stay at $20/mo.
People will go to alternative models, but it likely will be as popular as Linux.
Replies
That why they need widen the moat; it appears not giving us access to hardware might be that moat.
They desperately need LLMs to stay rentier and hardware advances are a direct attack on their model.
Economics will be decisive force. Paying 1000USD a month for AI or buying server for 10kUSD, loading there Chinese AI model which can do 90% of what SOTA models can? Looks like a no brainer.
Yeah, they'll be free - on device and "good enough".
If you want the best, then pay.
Possibly, but that assumes continuity. New math and algorithmic breakthroughs could make much of today’s AI stack legacy, reshuffling both costs and winners.
I don't know about you, but I benefit so much from using Claude at work that I would gladly pay $1,500-$2,000 per month to keep using it.
Yeah, this is something I am thinking a lot about. Companies won't be able to sustain this level of spending forever, and one of two things will need to happen:
1. Models become commodities and immensely cheaper to operate for inference as a result of some future innovation. This would presumably be very bad for the handful of companies who have invested that $1T and want to recoup that, but great for those of us who love cheap inference.
2. #1 doesn't happen and the model providers start begin to feel empowered to pass the true cost of training + inference down to the model consumer. We start paying thousands of dollars per month for model usage and the price gate blocks out most people from reaping the benefits of bleeding-edge AI, instead being locked into cheaper models that are just there to extract cash by selling them things.
Personally I'm leaning toward #1. Future models near as good as the absolute best will get far cheaper to train, and new techniques and specialized inference chips will make them much cheaper to use. It isn't hard for me to imagine another Deepseek moment in the not-so-distant future. Perhaps Anthropic is thinking the same thing given the rumors that they are rumored to be pushing toward an IPO as early as this year.