Comment by cedws
2 hours ago
Another theory I came up with: inference is too cheap for AI companies to be profitable. Hence, they need to get into the cloud services business. They can try to justify forcing customers on to their own high margin cloud platform with the rationale it’s the only way to monitor what the agents are up to.
All of this Hugging Face business is the perfect pretext: AI agents are hard to control and potentially dangerous, we (AI companies) have to keep a tight leash on them, you have to use our infra.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is basically for free, and good enough if you know how to program.
When this bursts, its going to be ugly.
There isn't enough compute for cheap models to destabilize the giants.
Back in May, Google was serving daily what openrouter served in a month, all models combined.
Compute is the moat.
> Compute is the moat.
Temporary moat; the way that electricity was once a moat, it was still only temporary.
Delusion.
They will invest in efficiency as they have been whilst compute comes online.
Wow you guys are dumb!
Thats my theory Preventing competition to stopp the race to near zero pricing