The section on "artificially low costs" does not make a lot of sense to me. If anything I feel like the costs are inflated for the frontier models, not "artificially low". Easy proof: GLM-5 costs about 1/10 as much as Opus. I'm not going to tell you it's as good as Opus 4.6 -- it's not -- but it performs comparably to where frontier models were 6 months ago. (It's on par with Sonnet 4.5 on leaderboards, though in practice it's probably closer to Sonnet 4.0.)

If I can switch to an open source model today, run it myself, and spend 1/10 as much as Opus, and get to about where frontier models were 6 months ago, fear-mongering about how we'll have to weather "orders-of-magnitude price hikes" and arguing that that one shouldn't even bother to learn how to use AI at all seems disconnected from reality. Who cares about the "shady accounting" OpenAI is doing, or that AI labs are "wildly unprofitable"? I can run GLM 5 right now, forever, for cheap.

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piker 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The post is factoring in training costs, not just inference.

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dwohnitmok 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

No it's not. Otherwise this part doesn't make sense

> in fact, they actually compound the problem by encouraging significantly more usage

because if eliminating training costs makes running the model above cost, the problem is helped by significantly more usage not compounded.

More usage compounds the problem only if inference is unprofitable.

(the article briefly mentions training but that's later).

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johnfn 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But I don't need to pay training costs to use GLM-5?

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piker 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but somebody needs to pay for GLM-6 unless you're happy to stop here.

	▲	InsideOutSanta 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If everybody stopped training models today and Anthropic and OpenAI were deleted from the universe, I'd be happy to just keep using GLM-5 at its current inference cost. The article's author assumes that there will be a point where we will no longer have access to good models at reasonable cost because current models are subsidized, but GLM-5 disproves that.