| ▲ | rich_sasha 2 hours ago |
| That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some uses. You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you! |
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| ▲ | throwaway277432 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Unironically yes. I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do. "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too. Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years. |
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| ▲ | revolvingthrow an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | If openai / anthropic / google were the only game in town then yea, we’d already be paying 5x as much as we do. But local models are so close to sota that it just isn’t going to happen. If I’m a lawyer getting billed $500k/yr on $600k profit I’d rather buy a chonky server and run a model that’s 90% as good and get my money back in 2 years, then pay $5k electricity on $600k profit. Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing. | |
| ▲ | KronisLV an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit. | | |
| ▲ | RussianCow an hour ago | parent [-] | | > the moat any single org has is somewhat limited I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives. | | |
| ▲ | KronisLV 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation. I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish). |
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| ▲ | vidarh an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Kimi and GLM 5.1 are already capable of handling a good chunk of my tasks. They about to lose the leverage to allow them to drastically increase prices - enough models are 6-12 months away from being good enough large proportions of their customers uses. | |
| ▲ | pingou an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now). | |
| ▲ | mystraline an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Its not20 years. Its now. Nvidia has already said that tokens cost more than humans. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c... |
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| ▲ | 2ndorderthought 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I'm not a lawyer but is this legal? It's extremely anticompetitive. |
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| ▲ | bdangubic an hour ago | parent [-] | | what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no? | | |
| ▲ | 2ndorderthought an hour ago | parent [-] | | They are technically billing people for services not rendered without any disclaimer? | | |
| ▲ | duped an hour ago | parent [-] | | Price discrimination for services is mostly legal | | |
| ▲ | in_cahoots an hour ago | parent [-] | | Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact? | | |
| ▲ | duped 15 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Depends. Comcast is able to charge you and a business for the same service at different rates. They have also tried to do exactly what you're talking about, where they bill differently based on the data being accessed (remember net neutrality?). But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not. In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time. Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it. |
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| ▲ | andai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So like taxes except they actually help you survive? |
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| ▲ | dangus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This is absolutely how it’s going work. AI loses way too much money to not be enshittified. It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag. |
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| ▲ | rapind 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent. | | |
| ▲ | delusional 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | When the consolidation phase starts, you bet your ass open weight models are going to stop. | | |
| ▲ | mitchitized an hour ago | parent [-] | | I don't think consolidation will ever happen, the AI space is already dominated by a few whales. Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out. |
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| ▲ | bugglebeetle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem. | |
| ▲ | delusional 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay? This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible. |
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