Comment by weinzierl

3 months ago

As exciting as it sounds, but

"As a constraint, a GA designer should aim at a system which costs, as of mid-2026, >$1,000⧸month"

will make this an elite tool for the privileged. I don't even disagree with the premise that people are shocked if something costs no matter how much value it delivers, nor do I suggest they should make it cheaper. It is just the realization that AI will accelerate the widening of the gap between the poor and the rich even more and there is probably nothing we can do about it.

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weinzierl

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wmf  3 months ago

2026: $1,000/month

2027: $100/month

2028: $10/month

  • rchaud  3 months ago

    Just because the hardware and inference costs may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins.

    Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.

    • wmf  3 months ago

      Since Guardian Angel is an inference vendor [1] hopefully they will set sustainable prices from day one so they don't need to increase prices later.

      [1] The announcement explains that they can't use APIs for privacy reasons.

      1 reply →

    • lanakei  3 months ago

      Companies aren't losing billions on AI, it is profitable. Currently, industry spend is more than industry revenue because there are massive gains expected from investment into more compute and research, but this isn't an inherent cost of the technology. Consider that OpenAI recently dropped the price of their frontier model by 90% [1].

      [1]: https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-fro...

  • KerrAvon  3 months ago

    this is not how it's going to go if OpenAI and Anthropic get their way and the US outlaws use of open-weight models