← Back to context

Comment by selectodude

5 hours ago

Okay? I didn’t sign a 10 year contract. We’re month to month and I use my own harness.

If they’re subsidizing my usage, that’s great.

6 comments

selectodude

Reply
infinitezest  5 hours ago

You're building your livelihood/workflows on a set of inputs that you have no idea what they actually cost or how reliable they'll be when the VC cash stops flowing. If you're OK with that, do your thing but it seems a little foolish to me.

  • selectodude  2 hours ago

    Push comes to shove, OpenAI could go out of business tomorrow and I could pick up roughly where I left off for $25k, which is the cost to serve GLM 5.3 Flash on four Nvidia GB10s. Granted, if OpenAI et al go kaput all at the same time, I could probably get a whole lot more compute for a whole lot less money.

  • derac  4 hours ago

    If the market crashes they will be much cheaper to run actually, no? Hardware would flood the market.

    • ssl-3  2 hours ago

      That should be the outcome, yes.

      In the event of a crash, the investors who put countless billions into this will be still be seeking to maximize their return. Even if it is just pennies on the dollar. Assets (including compute hardware) will be sold, just as they are also sold when any other business fails.

      Or maybe a crash doesn't happen. Maybe prices rise to the moon instead and there's nothing we can do to lower them.

      Or maybe (just maybe!) a crash never happens and there's never a huge price increase. Prices stay low-ish.

      All of these possible outcomes suggest to me that the maximally-sane option that a user can select, today, is to burn it while it lasts. And then, if/when a crash or a massive price increase occurs, just adjust accordingly. (The rest of us will all be in that same boat, too.)

  • slopinthebag  1 hour ago

    huh? i use the plans because they're cheap and i get strong models, but i could go back to deepseek flash on commodity api pricing and be just fine

  • fragmede  3 hours ago

    It seems silly to say we have no idea when we actually do, though. We know how much hardware costs, we know how to reliably run a webservice that hits an API hosted on a machine with a GPU, we know how to operate these things at scale outside of OpenAI and Anthropic (not Nvidia). VC money can be patient, Uber's profitable, yeah $1 Uber rides got us hooked and they're running the same playbook. Unfortunately the convenience is worth paying for, so it seems dumb to think we can control the beast or ignore it, or get everyone to agree to hold back.

    Is there a world where OpenAI starts charging $2,000/month for what we previously were paying $20 for? What are we going to do? AWS could totally jack up the prices for EC2 instances as well, but we've come to rely on that as well.