Comment by alexandre_m
14 hours ago
It should be obvious that these services are operating at a loss. The monthly subscriptions especially, but I’m even skeptical that the linear API pricing is sustainable.
It feels like a classic “drug dealer” model to me. Get everyone hooked with cheap access, then raise prices later. Unless there’s a major breakthrough in the underlying technology, I don’t see how a significant price increase isn’t inevitable once adoption is locked in.
This seems unlikely while we have open weights models available that are ~as decent as the frontier ones.
Given the API prices for open weights models of similar size are 5-10x less than the frontier models the APIs are very profitable on a pure unit economics approach. I strongly suspect they make money off their monthly plans as well.
Did people learn nothing from the rise, stall, and now fall of social networks?
Yes, AI can do some incredible things. But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies. Running at a loss. A reality check is coming.
It’s not a technology problem. It’s an economic problem. People are too busy looking at the tech to notice.
> But we’re also running full speed into an ecosystem controlled by 2 or 3 major companies.
We aren't, though. They think we are :-/
The reality is that tokens are the second-lowest value link in the AI value-chain (the lowest-value item being electricity).
These providers are operating low down in the value chain; they are trying to sell a fungible, easy replaceable and (if hardware price trends is any indication) easily self-hostable.
They have no secret sauce, no moat. If they jack up the prices, their users will simply move to the next provider, and repeat ad nauseum as long as VCs want to subsidise in the hope of a landgrab.
I'm not concerned, they're accelerating research and development into hardware and more optimal models. People forget that you can locally host some of the early models quantized to 4 with reasonable inference with a 4080 and 64gb of ram. There are daily tools being released that are a simple click and run, without much hassle other than downloading the model and you're off and running.
Yes there is mad dash by Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, and China not to cede their position to each other - it actually isn't about who will buy or pay for the service its more of a Business Strategic position to obtain critical mass in a new market using their massive reserve of cash. The users right now are insignificant to their goal - they probably aren't even given a second thought.