This kind of scarce thinking is almost always wrong and will lead you to down a sad dark HN loser path. Tokens will get cheaper. It costs OpenAI less money to serve GPT-5.5 than GPT-4. Ppl don't understand how much efficiency gains are being made with algo breakthroughs as well as hardware improvements that counter balance the demand rise. Open source models are 3-6 months behind. The world is your oyster stop worrying about how things will go wrong start thinking about what you can do today so you don;'t end up like the writer.

To be frank, we live in sad dark HN loser times.

"It costs OpenAI less money to serve GPT-5.5 than GPT-4." does it though? do you have the numbers? Or you just making stuff up?

This is only true if there is enough competition with equally good SOTA models. Otherwise, the price of the best models will keep increasing until people don't buy them anymore and use humans instead. Regardless of how much it costs to operate in reality. There is a reason why non-profit unnamed company turned to profit company.

Very much agree - efficiency improvements are very real both on model and hardware side. The reliance on proprietary OpenAI/anthropic APIs is a problem though, one that will naturally resolve itself in the favour of self-hosted/open models.

It's just like saying every dependency is a ticking bomb. In a very strict sense, it's true. But it really doesn't matter for most businesses (and absolutely doesn't matter for early stage startups.)

Where do you work?

moores law ftw

Lot of "trust me bro" vibes with this post

> sad dark HN loser path

Assertion assertion assertion wishful thinking assertion.

Show, don't tell. Show us that we're wrong and this isn't a VC black hole. The CEO of Enron as late as September 2001 could've called every critic a sad dark loser with nobody challenging him publicly. Jim Cramer famously yelled anyone pulling their money from Bear Sterns in 2008 was "silly, do not be silly" exactly 8 days before their collapse and a -92% stock drop. In COVID, calling everyone paranoid and sensationalist about some mythical new flu was popular in December 2019 and gone by March 2020. How about Uber, the seeming go-to for how VCs can turn a money hole into a profitable business? The average price increase is now 18% per year and still going up, with an over 60% increase in 5 years. Does anyone still talk about the "sad dark HN loser path" of those who doubted VR in 2018? How's your VR startup doing?

I don't think so. AI use is still very limited. For OpenAI and Anthropic and the AI boom to match their valuation, AI adoption needs to increase substantially. The current constraint is data centers. Pricing will be heavily influenced by market dynamics. Plenty of things that should be cheap aren't because of scarcity (simple example: RAM).

Datacenter GPUs pinned to 100% won't make it to their 3rd anniversary, models are getting larger and larger, they get smarter by running longer "reasoning" loops, there is no indication that it'll get better soon.

> Open source models are 3-6 months behind.

On the benchmarks included in their training set yes, not in real life