This, the push towards per-token API charging, and the rest are just a sign of things to come when they finally establish a moat and full monoply/duopoly, which is also what all the specialized tools like Designer and integrations are about.

It's going to be a very expensive game, and the masses will be left with subpar local versions. It would be like if we reversed the democratization of compilers and coding tooling, done in the 90s and 00s, and the polished more capable tools are again all proprietary.

I doubt that’s the case. My guess is we’ll hit asymptomatic returns from transformers, but price-to-train will fall at moore’s law.

So over time older models will be less valuable, but new models will only be slightly better. Frontier players, therefore, are in a losing business. They need to charge high margins to recoup their high training costs. But latecomers can simply train for a fraction of the cost.

Since performance is asymptomatic, eventually the first-mover advantage is entirely negligible and LLMs become simple commodity.

The only moat I can see is data, but distillation proves that this is easy to subvert.

There will probably be a window though where insiders get very wealthy by offloading onto retail investors, who will be left with the bag.

If only there were an Open AI company who's mandate, built into the structure of the company, were to make frontier models available to everyone for the good of humanity.

Oh well

Yep, between this and the pricing for the code review tool that was released a couple weeks ago (15-25 a review), and the usage pricing and very expensive cost of Claude Design, I do wonder if Anthropic is making a conscious, incremental effort to raise the baseline for AI engineering tasks, especially for enterprise customers.

You could call it a rug pull, but they may just be doing the math and realize this is where pricing needs to shift to before going public.