until Microsoft buys it and enshits it.

This is a fun thought experiment. I believe that we are now at the $5 Uber (2014) phase of LLMs. Where will it go from here?

How much will a synthetic mid-level dev (Opus 4.5) cost in 2028, after the VC subsidies are gone? I would imagine as much as possible? Dynamic pricing?

Will the SOTA model labs even sell API keys to anyone other than partners/whales? Why even that? They are the personalized app devs and hosts!

Man, this is the golden age of building. Not everyone can do it yet, and every project you can imagine is greatly subsidized. How long will that last?

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tern an hour ago | parent | next [-]

While I remember $5 Ubers fondly, I think this situation is significantly more complex:

- Models will get cheaper, maybe way cheaper

- Model harnesses will get more complex, maybe way more complex

- Local models may become competitive

- Capital-backed access to more tokens may become absurdly advantaged, or not

The only thing I think you can count on is that more money buys more tokens, so the more money you have, the more power you will have ... as always.

But whether some version of the current subsidy, which levels the playing field, will persist seems really hard to model.

All I can say is, the bad scenarios I can imagine are pretty bad indeed—much worse than that it's now cheaper for me to own a car, while it wasn't 10 years ago.

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andai an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The real question is how long it'll take for Z.ai to clone it at 80% quality and offer it at cost. The answer appears to be "like 3 months".

	▲	consumer451 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is a super interesting dynamic! The CCP is really good at subsidizing and flooding global markets, but in the end, it takes power to generate tokens. In my Uber comparison, it was physical hardware on location... taxis, but this is not the case with token delivery. This is such a complex situation in that regard, however, once the market settles and monopolies are created, eventually the price will be what market can bear. Will that actually create an increase in gross planet product, or will the SOTA token providers just eat up the existing gross planet product, with no increase? I suppose whoever has the cheapest electricity will win this race to the bottom? But... will that ever increase global product? ___ Upon reflection, the comment above was very likely influenced by this truly amazing quote from Satya Nadella's interview on the Dwarkesh podcast. This might be one of the most enlightened things that I have ever heard: > Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is: the world growing at 10%. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/satya-nadella#:~:text=Us%20self%2...