I love LLMs too, but I am concerned about their cost. They are all still very subsidised. Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> They are all still very subsidised.

I think the opposite: I think the frontier labs have good margins on their inference unit costs.

We can already see what it costs to run near frontier-size models. There are independent business pivoting to serving these models at reasonable prices and they're competing on OpenRouter for costs much lower than frontier labs.

> Is there any guarantee that I'll be able to run a Opus 4.8-level model on my personal computer before the big AI labs decide to hike up the prices?

I would bet good money on prices going down significantly, not up.

If we get to the point where you can run an Opus 4.8 model on your local computer, it's going to be even cheaper for a datacenter to serve it on their hardware. That means prices crash, not that they're going to rise.

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theli0nheart 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

They may have good margins, but a few things are still true:

1. Much of those profits have to be immediately reinvested into model training runs to avoid being lapped by competitions.

2. Unit costs are irrelevant when the labs don't price per unit, and instead charge, for instance, $200 / month for $10k worth of tokens.

This isn't a steady state. Whatever the current situation is, I doubt it's sustainable.

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helloplanets 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The subscription based plans are heavily subsidized, but the direct API inference pricing (which larger companies need to pay) is profitable.

Using a full Claude Max 20x plan to 100% of weekly usage would easily cost you 2k through the API. While the Claude Max 20x plan is 200 a month.

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dgellow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interestingly enough, geohot also has an article covering this: https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/18/pric...

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-]

That's commentary on company valuations.

Token prices are going down. Competition is global. A company could choose to keep their API prices high, but if another company comes in at 1/10th the price for 95% of the performance then they won't have many customers.

	▲	dgellow an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You’re right, my bad, I read that too quickly

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dude250711 42 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought hardware prices would always just keep going down.

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ekidd 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can maybe run a local Sonnet-4.5-ish-level model (sort of) for less than the price of a new car, even at current massively inflated prices for fast RAM. This is probably not what you were looking for. But it's there. You could share one server between multiple developers. Maybe make a little AI co-op or something, with a pair of RTX Pro 6000 cards?

Also, DeepSeek V4 Pro is cheap via any commodity API, and DeepSeek V4 Flash is essentially free at API prices like $0.09/M, $0.18/M out. This is generally not subsidized.

For a more practical local setup, Qwen3.6 27B on a used Nvidia 3090 (US$1300) or two is surprisingly nice. It needs clear instructions and you can't use it for hands-off vibecoding, but it's actually quite reasonable for hands-on programmers.

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EgregiousCube an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Guarantee is too strong a thing to seek, but healthy competition makes it highly likely that the supply/demand curve will meet at a healthy place.

You're always guaranteed that you can stash away the open models!

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talloaktrees an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Currently, because of the subsidies from the frontier models, demand is mostly for higher intelligence.

If subsidies do end, demand for price efficiency per unit of intelligence will go way up.And because there's many players in the market, this demand should be met by at least some of them.

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fragmede 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

GLM-5.2 is runnable and downloadable today on a MacBook studio that costs a stupid amount of money. No one can take that away from you except by force though, if you want to set it up today.