Comment by leptons
6 days ago
I'm using AI in many ways but I'm not ignoring that it has some real costs. The code AI writes is too voluminous to fully review. I'm quite disconnected from it, and probably won't be able to maintain it myself. The more we use AI to code, the more our real skills atrophy (already feeling that). And when AI pricing finally catches up with the astronomical spending going into it, people are going to have a rude awakening. Nothing good is coming from any of this, unless you're able to cash in before the economy collapses when this bubble finally bursts.
I guess it depends, but what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?
The time I previously spent writing code is now spent reviewing code and giving feedback so that it gets written differently if don't like it.
The skills required have changed completely imo. You need to be able to context switch efficiently and review "better". Also identify which tasks require lots of supervision of what the AI generates and which don't.
I think AI is here to stay. Open models keep the costs at a certain level. If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost. Even if models never improve beyond today, the open ones are good enough at this point to provide immense value.
Just my opinion of course.
>what are you doing with all your time if you aren't reviewing the code and trying to make it maintainable?
I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR. Instead of reading PRs, we're all telling the AI to do more work to create even more PRs. It's not a good way forward, and I'm looking for another job.
>If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost.
To self-host a frontier-adjacent model at speed comparable to a commercial API, you're looking at roughly $250k-500k to buy or $20-35k/month to rent the GPUs. And that's only enough to operate at current "frontier" model capability, and buying also doesn't include the massive amounts of electricity it will cost every month to run that hardware. Admittedly I used AI to come up with those figures, so take it with a grain of salt, but judging from how much these AI companies are spending, it tracks that they are consuming massive amounts of money on a per-user basis just to gain market share. I've tried to self-host AI and it sucks. I wouldn't use it for coding.
>I think AI is here to stay.
Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.
> I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR.
That sucks, may as well auto approve with a script.
> Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.
You can go on open router and see what 3rd parties are hosting open models for. There are some pretty capable models (not frontier, but probably opus 4.5 level) for pretty cheap.
Those companies have no incentive to lose money. They are nameless, they are making a profit just providing the service, and it's cheaper than the frontier models of today.
So I think we have a pretty good idea about what the price can be, even without VC subsidizing.
AI pricing finally catching up? What do you mean? Every few months prices are going down by 5x. Your price correction will not happen and it’s time to accept it.
I'm interested in which model prices have went down 5x on multiple occasions? Are you talking about subscription or API/Token pricing?
If you think of what you could do for $200 last year vs today, I could argue the prices went down.
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Seems like you are keeping your head in the sand about how much the AI companies are spending vs. how much they are bringing in. These companies are following the Uber model of pricing, trying to beat the competition and drive them out of the market. Uber is very expensive now, because they have to pay for all the many billions of dollars they spent being unprofitable, trying to drive out competition. It didn't really work, Lyft is still a thing, and both of them are way more expensive now than when they first started, an order of magnitude more expensive, and it isn't just inflation, it's all the debt they incurred that needs to be paid back. I used to take Uber all the time, and now it's only if I really, really have to, because it's just too expensive.
The AI companies are doing the exact same thing - operating at massive losses (far more than Uber ever did, to an extreme extent), trying to "win" the AI arms race, playing a game of chicken with their competitors.