Comment by mrweasel
12 hours ago
You can only increase the price so much. With every price increase you're going to lose customers, which could lead to further price increases.
I'm not entirely convince that the AI companies can raise prices and keep enough of their customer base to make their current strategy commercially viable.
They could also lower their production cost, but that runs counter to building/buying new datacenter capacity. Realistically I think they need to look for applications where cheaper models are just as good and niches that where the ROI on AI is more clear.
Realistically they can't go that much above the actual cost for inference since the customer can always switch to self hosted or inference only providers. Or their models have to be significantly better than the open source models for the foreseeable future. They will never be able to charge much more for their lower tier models.