Compute is about to come an appreciating asset in the near-term, and it some ways it already is.

The frontier labs are shifting from pricing grounded in the price of compute, to pricing grounded in the intelligence provided, or more specifically the economic value of that intelligence downstream.

The margins on that allow them to pay a hefty premium on compute and still come out ahead.

As they buy more compute at high prices, they're also pricing out competition from cheaper models. It's already become materially more difficult to get compute to run open weight models at competitive prices as a result of frontier labs in the last year.

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enos_feedler 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

There is zero evidence of this shift in pricing occurring. It’s still a dream which seems unlikely

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dylan604 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It feels like this is the line people are using to justify the expense of compute capex

	▲	otterley 25 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The fact that you can sell or lease out something for more than you bought it for is justification in and of itself.
	▲	BoorishBears 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I run a consumer AI product and the current reality of trying to get compute vs what it was 6-12 months ago is enough to justify it to anyone who has the money. I think OpenClaw created a mania that was completely unfounded (Apple Silicon is worth dirt compared to literally anything from NVIDIA including consumer GPUs), but the prediction of compute becoming scarce was correct

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BoorishBears 15 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

News to me?

Opus 4.7 has all the signs of a smaller model distilled from a newer pretraining run... except a smaller price.

Flash 3.5 raised in price pretty meaningfully over Fladh 3

GPT 5.4 got a small price bump over 5.3-Codex/5.2 and then gpt-5.5 doubled pricing over gpt-5.4

Even open weights isn't immune: Kimi K2.6 was originally priced higher despite openly being 2.5 + more post-training, same with GLM 5.1 vs 5

All while rental prices are spiking month over month, NVIDIA Inception discounted prices for buying are higher than undiscounted prices for buying 6 months ago...