Comment by viraptor
16 days ago
There are already providers that are comically cheap at the moment. Minimax/M2.1 for example is good-enough for many things and 15min long sessions still cost something like 2c. Another version or two and Claude is likely going to start feeling the pressure (or minimax will raise the prices - we'll see)
> There are already providers that are comically cheap at the moment.
But how many of those providers are too subsidizing their offering through investment capital? I don't know offhand of anyone in this space that is running at or close to breakeven.
It feels very much like the early days of streaming when you could watch everything with a single Netflix account. Those days are long gone and never coming back.
I don't think it matters in practice. Yesterday we could run GPT oss, today we can run m2.1, tomorrow we'll run something comparable to Opus4.5. The open models are getting so good that what we get at the end of this year will be "good enough" locally for years, even if everything else burns down.