> The demand for AI is currently overwhelming.

Wait until they charge the real pice, if I sold a dollar for 10ct I'd also have a lot of demand.

I'm burning billions of tokens on chatgpt "deepresearch Pro extended" for things I wouldn't even bother googling, the second I have to pay even 2x the price I won't use that anymore

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hootz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can't that be countered by the fact that you can pay a reasonable price (something like 20 or 30 bucks) for small businesses independent flat-rate inference subscriptions of models like GLM-5.1? They aren't being subsidized, they just balance normal and power users around their flat rate. Just check something like synthetic.new, Ollama Cloud or OpenCode Go.

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vanuatu 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hear this analogy (selling a dollar for 10ct) but it's unclear to me how we can cleanly map intelligence to cents.

If the LLM was GPT-1, most people wouldn't even use it for free. So clearly there's another axis here?

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Micrococonut 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The analogy is implying that the revenue generated by providers is dwarfed by the total expenditure on inference & continuously training the next best model. These providers have large operational costs and the presumption is that they are providing a dollar ~worth~ of product for 10 cents. Worth being calculable based on the actual capital & operational costs of providing the service.

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vanuatu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

anthropic models are profitable fully loaded (rev - inference cost - training cost)

	▲	Micrococonut 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea I don't know if that's true or not. I'm just saying that is what they are getting at.

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ls612 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The estimates I've seen are that running inference at scale on a Deepseek V3 sized model (so 700B parameters) costs roughly $0.70/mtok or so given current H100 rental costs. Sonnet charges $15/mtok on the API so the delta between the true cost and the API cost is quite large, to the point where even many subscription users are likely profitable.