Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons.

This is the crisis point for vibe-coders. A developer can go back to writing code by hand, as horrible as that might sound. Someone who hasn't learned to code but builds with AI can't go back. They either pay or they stop. That will be an painful choice whichever way you fall.

All of the silent, hidden model routing OpenAI does strongly suggests that the unit economics are not just fine, at least not yet.

If apparently the only way you can make money with your product this early is to dilute and adulterate it behind the scenes, it strongly suggests you want the customer to continue to believe they are getting value that you can't afford to supply.

More prosaically: if either of these firms could prove that they were even really close to profitable on inference, they would have bloomin' said so while they were trying to raise more money.

The dependent idea is questionable- when your boss tells you to not use the most expesive models-you just dont

I would assume when price hikes happen either 1) less non technical people would vibecode as it doesnt impact the work that much 2) people use the cheaper chinese models 3)we're jamming ai into everything because were exploring. We will just niche down into use cases that provide high roi

AI is a worker for me. That i pay for. Basically i am in the same game now to reduce the prizes i have to pay for my workers. Just like the employers are, that seek to reduce costs for employees, as we are simply too expensive. We need more competition among the workers. Let's introduce more chinese workforce! ;)

I'm finding it challenging to believe they wouldn't just cannibalize anything dependent on them in that way or at minimum launch a directly competing product.

It's a really different market, though. New entrants can easily undercut them if they price too high