Amazon would absolutely take a loss on certain products in order to dominate the category, squeeze out competitors and then bring the price back up. It's one of the reasons they're so dominant in general now. Also one of the reasons why Amazon Basics has basically everything that exists and they're usually at or near the top of their respective categories -- third-party sellers simply can't compete.

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sschueller 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Amazon wasn't competing against open and free models that are starting to be good enough running on existing laptops.

OpenAI and Anthropic's moat is filling with cement faster than they can dig.

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LoganDark 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I have 128 GB of unified memory (M4 Max) and the user experience with local inference is still pretty bad. I'm so glad something like llama.cpp exists so I don't have to wrangle Python (which I hate), but OpenCode is entirely disrespectful of the KV-cache so I had to switch to Pi (but Pi is going relatively well actually).

Even so, I can't really run at hundreds of tokens per second which is practically table stakes for my work. Even if I did manage to run that fast, the model would probably be completely braindead and stomp all over the task.

Wish I could afford an M5 Max but I've been between jobs for months without even a single interview. Sucks to be a developer these days.

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sschueller 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Try Kilocode with deepseek v4 (via API directly to deepseek, much cheaper than via kilo).

I have had very good results and compared to others it just costs pennies.

I use something similar to this https://github.com/ScotterMonk/AgentAutoFlow setup and switch between deepseek v4 to flash depending on task.

	▲	LoganDark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do use DeepSeek, it's exceptionally cheap! Inference is slow though, and it's not particularly intelligent but the experience is better than local inference.

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Haven880 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To a certain extent, but not completely. OpenAI and Anthropic are taking losses on their entire offering—that is a huge difference. Amazon, for example, has pumped its profits back into R&D for decades. What AI companies are doing right now is running the Uber playbook on an epic scale. In the US, there isn't much competition, so they can maintain a duopoly. But look at what happened in China: Uber collapsed and pulled out. Now, the entire world is facing competition from DeepSeek and Qwen at a fraction of the cost. According to a reliable Shenzhen source, they will halve their prices again by the end of this year using newer Huawei GPUs. The current 7nm chips are already bleeding OpenAI dry. By the end of this year, they will upgrade to 5nm, and by June of next year, 3nm. They don't even have to be better—just 95% as good at 1/20th of the price. I don't see OpenAI and Anthropic surviving much outside of America; they are likely staring down Groupon’s fate. You can research it yourself: China has no issues with electricity because they have a massive power surplus. This is why OpenAI and Anthropic are so scared right now. They must IPO by 2027, because after that, they will suffer the exact same fate as Groupon.

	▲	LoganDark 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I do love the DeepSeek models, they're so incredibly cheap and for functionality that nears Sonnet. Weeks of heavy usage still lands squarely under $10 for me. Compare that with how I pay $200 a month for Claude and am still hitting the limits with any sort of sustained usage. They even have a special usage limit for Sonnet to prevent you from using too much of that either. I'm super frustrated with how slow DeepSeek is though. And it's not nearly ready to be unsupervised for long periods of time like Claude is. Just this morning I left Fable 5 unsupervised for about eight hours straight. Single turn. DeepSeek often gets even much shorter turns wrong, so I wouldn't trust it with anywhere near that length of time alone. Not to mention it'd get so much less done because of how slow it is. Also, did you use an LLM to correct your grammar after you posted? Lol

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watwut 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Whole SV is subsidizing things to kill competitiom it all the time. L

However, Amazon was not racking debt the way these companies are. Both their behavior and financials were miles apart from these ai companies.

	▲	LoganDark 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Subsidizing is indeed different than burning cash, for sure.