Comment by AstroBen
4 hours ago
> The models don’t have to get better, the costs don’t have to come down (heck, they could even double and it’d still be worth it)
What worries me about this is that it might end up putting up a barrier for those that can't afford it. What do things look like if models cost $1000 or more a month and genuinely provide 3x productivity improvements?
If they're paying you, they can afford it. Also, even if running large teams of coding agents becomes practical, you don't necessarily need more than one or two to learn.
$1000 a month to make someone whose being $10,000 a month even 1.5x more productive is well worth the price.
Today we have open source projects that can compete with proprietary ones just because people without initial funding had the ability to make it competitive
You can bootstrap something with yourself and a friend with some hard work and intelligence
This is available to people all over the world, even those in countries where $1000 is a months salary
Microsoft and their employees will be fine, yeah. That's not who I'm thinking about
They want you to have to pay for an advantage. If a single AI provider gets enough advantage, they'll be able to charge whatever they want.
Given that models seem to be converging to similar capabilities and that there are plenty of open weights models out there market competition should drive prices towards the marginal cost of inference.
I mean, your employer will pay it. $1K/month is cheap for your employer.
But there is an interesting point about what it does to hobby dev. If it takes real money just to screw around for fun on your own, it's kinda like going back to the old days when you needed to have an account on a big university system to do anything with Unix.
Open source software
Small bootstrapped startups
Are more what I had in mind. Of course an established company can pay it. I don't like the idea of a world where all software is backed by big companies
I'm not too worried about startups: We used to have startups when they had to buy expensive physical servers and pay for business-class T1 connections and rent offices and all that. The idea that you can start a company with $20 and a dream is relatively new, and honestly a little bit of friction might be good.
But yeah, I share your concern about open source and hobby projects. My hope would be that you get free tiers that are aimed at hobby/non-profit/etc stuff, but who knows.