We don't know what AI should cost but if you look at the numbers then 2x more expensive is much too low.

Think about the pricing. OpenAI fixed everyone's prices to free and/or roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription, which in turn was pinned to the cost of a cable TV subscription (originally). These prices were made up to sound good to his friends, they weren't chosen based on sane business modelling.

Then everyone had to follow. So Anthropic launched Claude Code at the same price point, before realizing that was deadly and overnight the price went up by an order of magnitude. From $20 to $200/month, and even that doesn't seem to be enough.

If the numbers leaked to Ed Zitron are true then they aren't profitable on inference. But even if that were true, so what? It's a meaningless statement, just another way of saying they're still under-pricing their models. Inferencing and model licensing are their only revenue streams! That has to cover everything including training, staff costs, data licensing, lawsuits, support, office costs etc.

Maybe OpenAI can launch an ad network soon. That's their only hope of salvation but it's risky because if they botch it users might just migrate to Grok or Gemini or Claude.

  Then everyone had to follow. So Anthropic launched Claude Code at the same price point, before realizing that was deadly and overnight the price went up by an order of magnitude. From $20 to $200/month, and even that doesn't seem to be enough.

I’ve wondered if it makes sense to buy Intel along with Cerebrus in order to use Intels newest nodes while under development to fab the Cerebrus wafer level inference chips which are more tolerant of defects. Overall that seems like the cheapest way to perform inference - if you have $100B.