> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)

None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs.

> In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in

Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don’t need that to ask ChatGPT. That war is lost already.

Subscription to the big players’ services would need to increase massively for that to happen. And the computational cost is only part of the problem; these models also eat a lot of storage and RAM, which is not exactly getting cheaper.

The typical "free" AI or cheap tiers are equivalent in power to a Qwen 3.6 model (which is also much cheaper to run in a hyperscaled situation than on my laptop or PC; a single H200 can host thousands of sessions of a typical chatbot user). There is no evidence the Chinese AI providers are being subsidised either.

You can look at API pricing on a service like OpenRouter (which isn't subsidised) and see pretty readily that it's not expensive to provide lower-tier inference. Higher-tier inference like GPT-5.6-Sol or Opus is expensive - $100 a month plan for realistic usage, and only up from there.