Comment by swiftcoder

2 days ago

Assuming this were accurate, then presumably the AI companies would be betting that inference costs come down before the bill is due - I don't see enterprises being willing to absorb another ~10x price increase for tokens (as they've just done going from subscription prices to per-token pricing)

For claude shops this was a huge hit. But lets back this up. There are some companies that haven't even built a break-even model at this price because they are funded by investment. As soon as those investors lose patience the first dominos will fall. For those who have somewhat of a business model, will it survive a price increase? The bigger question is do the base model providers have enough runway and have a way to keep going as they need to recover costs.

  • It's mostly R&D though, not inference. If LLM's effectively become a commodity then they are screwed anyway.

    • Aren’t the Chinese labs quickly turning them into a commodity?

      The open-weight models will have a steady race to the bottom on inference costs just by dint of competition between providers. They aren’t at the frontier yet, but they are rapidly eating the flash market.