alt Hacker NewsWhy would there be a rug pull? Open models do seem to be giving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic some decent-ish competition, so if they try to increase prices too much then people can just leave them.
Replies
For the same reason that most businesses are on AWS/GCloud rather than having a server room in the office.
Self hosting is a complex investment. Competitors need an stupidly expensive amount of hardware to enter the scene if they're going to serve SaaS. Chinese backed models can be regulated out of competition. Openai and Anthropic will soon be semi exclusive sources of training data as development happens on private conversations.
Success is not guaranteed, but it is crystal clear that the goal is replacing us and then pricing the replacement as the largest possible percentage of our salaries possible.
It's the oldest trick in the book. Place a heavily discounted supermarket in town, wait for all local businesses to close, raise prices.
That's not the rug pull.
The rug pull is every software engineer losing their job.
All LLM are heavily subsidized by investors. No one is paying the true cost of tokens at the moment. The rug pull is to get as many people defendant on the tool before they have to massively increase prices.