> "just a few dollars per million tokens"

Google AI Pro is like $15/month for practically unlimited Pro requests, each of which take million tokens of context (and then also perform thinking, free Google search for grounding, inline image generation if needed). This includes Gemini CLI, Gemini Code Assist (VS Code), the main chatbot, and a bunch of other vibe-coding projects which have their own rate limits or no rate limits at all.

It's crazy to think this is sustainable. It'll be like Xbox Game Pass - start at £5/month to hook people in and before you know it it's £20/month and has nowhere near as many games.

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harrall an hour ago | parent [-]

OpenAI only released ChatGPT 4 years ago but…

Google has made custom AI chips for 11 years — since 2015 — and inference costs them 2-5x less than it does for every other competitor.

The landmark paper that invented the techniques behind ChatGPT, Claude and modern AI was also published by Google scientists 9 years ago.

That’s probably how they can afford it.

	▲	illiac786 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that the TPUs are one of the things that are underestimated (based on my personal reading of HN). Google already has a huge competitive advantage because they have more data than anyone else, bundle Gemini in each android to siphon even more data, and the android platform. The TPUs truly make me believe there actually could be a sort of monopoly on LLMs in the end, even though there are so many good models with open weights, so little (technical) reasons to create software that only integrates with Gemini, etc. Google will have a lion‘s share of inferring I believe. OpenAI and Claude will have a very hard time fighting this.