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ungreased0675today at 11:40 AM2 repliesview on HN

Right now LLMs are heavily subsidized. When that ends, the actual cost of the service may exceed its usefulness for many use cases.


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hellohello2today at 4:48 PM

Computation halves in price every ~2 years so maybe in the short term but not in the long term

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almostdeadguytoday at 11:57 AM

I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure.

I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data center construction that gets outpaced by computing demand, increasing energy costs, and low switching costs for customers will force the model labs to make changes that increase the barrier to entry (either via higher pricing, more restrictive rate limiting, etc.). or force their customers into longer term commitments.

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