But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI.

I use AI every day at work, but I only pay $20. That's the most I will ever want to pay. And, so far, it gives me everything I need.

If OpenAI or Anthropic suddenly said "Sorry, the game is up. You'll have to pay $100/month now", I would 100% look into cheaper Chinese solutions.

I suspect the AI subscription (or API) economy is whale economy. You have a small, small percentage of users that are happy to pay whatever it takes - while the vast majority will either use the free tier, and then the next group will pay for the cheapest or next cheapest subscription.

EDIT: And I'll echo what another user wrote here. The VAST majority of office users around the world don't work for tech companies flush in cash. Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards. Even more so for all the government workers around the world.

The video quotes sales of $2.5 trillion a year to payoff those investments. What workforce you divide it by is a bit up in the air, but let's use 500 millions, which is basically 100% of the workforce of US + Europe + some change. That gives you around $500 a month per employee (from hedge fund manager to flipping burgers at McDonald's).

And there will be competition. I see zero moat right now. The user specific part of the state of the model sits outside of the control of the model (it is basically my code base, or my prompts, all of which I can transfer to any competitor).

But AI use translates directly to time savings (if it works). You only need 1-2 hours of time savings per employee per week to break even on a $100/seat/month subscription.

To put it into perspective if we consider that US salaries are 3 to 5 times those of other "rich" countries then it's already a 60 to 100 dollar subscription for the next richest part of the world.

> Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards

I doubt that. In my tiny town in India, office workers use the 1800 INR (20$) plans. 1800 INR/month is like... 4% of the salary these guys get. And since this is mostly MS-office and windows explorer and chrome based stuff in very small, non-tech companies, it pays for itself in literally a day. If they _could_ pay less they would. After all they pirate MS office. But the cheap chinese plans dont have any distribution, whereas OpenAI seems to have effectively marketed to them via IPL ads and such. No one there even knows about deepseek. It also doesn't help deepseek and such are focused on the coding market. No multimodal, office plugins, etc.

For personal stuff, people there use Meta AI - mostly because it is directly available in whatsapp and these days they are pushing it by adding a dedicated button for it right on the home page. Regardless, they still call it "chatgpt". OpenAI brand is unmatched.

anthropic and openai are a part of the ai economy, but not the only. the most valuable company in the world is nvidia, a massive player that benefits from the existance of the ow models.

what im trying to say is that we focus a bit too much on the labs, but the biggest part is in the infra that makes everything possible.

bingo. it helped me sort through 2 CSVs earlier today.

grunt work, really, and nothing some python skills or excel-fu couldn't solve just as quickly.

it also got something wrong, and I had to put it into a different AI to understand why. not really to bad though, a 2 minute, sanity check.

I'd pay no more than, say $3 for the use, maybe 5. If they want to start clocking us $200 a day, or $4000 a license or whatever -- nah.

> But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI.

That depends on how much more money they can make with AI or save with AI. It shouldn't be very hard to know that number in a well run business. Even for a one man business.

If they can get productivity increases equivalent to .1% it pays for itself. That's roughly equivalent to firing 1 in 1000 employees to finance the software.

I pay the 200 max for Fable daily driving and it’s worth every penny

Won't the Chinese providers have to raise their prices as well due to the economics of serving inference at scale?

>I'm sure there will be some losers,

This is the way it is on Wall Street more each century, and for AI to go public on that exchange it's going to have to go big or go home. Considering the amount of money that has already been spent privately.

There is no alternative pipeline to replenish those reserves, and different people have different ideas about capacity and bottlenecks relative to ambitions and what they are supposed to get for their money.

As has been mentioned in another comment, there is no alternative foundation other than optimism either. The exchange wouln't exist if it weren't originally intended to trade only shares that were all worth holding otherwise. Naturally some worth holding more than others. This is so big it will be necessary to be able to fool way more people with way more money than usual, otherwise those that prevail will have nowhere near their wildest dreams come true.

Naturally AI is never going to fly off the shelf like it could until it starts getting cheaper all the time for huge jumps in performance. Cheap home computers will need to be able to do quite a bit more than they can only do today while connected to a massive AI data center, without ever having been connected to anything outside the home at all. Otherwise AI can not ever be considered "general" any more than computing could be considered personal, until you were no longer reliant on a remote mainframe in a huge out-of-state data center somewhere tied by a thread leading through a squeaky modem over monopolized communication lines. This differential between clunky (clanky?) old data centers' overall computing power relative to the amount held freely within homes & businesses is something that looks like it could be regaining exploitability like never in decades. I know one day Woz jumped right in without needing to be a greedy businessman because there was no possible downside, and he could let just about any dedicated growth leader make as much money as they wanted off his technology. Plus Jobs was no slouch in many ways and Woz never needed to worry with a product that sells itself to begin with, putting Jobs in hog heaven where he could persuasively bring it to the next level almost whenever he wanted like you can do few other ways.

So not just dot-com related hardware & software.

That goes for memory and storage too, people should do the math on how affordable nominal amounts are supposed to be by now. If everything were still normal 16GB of DDR4 would be about $10, at least by 2027, so it hasn't merely doubled in the last year which is the most obvious part, it has skyrocketed to 10x what it would have been. And still rising not falling, so all this is going to have to be reversed for consumers to even afford what they used to be able to do.

For people who didn't want to spend a thing on AI until it's naturally way more capable and constantly getting cheaper like it should be, it's pretty frustrating when it's already been unavoidably costing "indirectly" more than they have been willing to pay if they were getting maximum benefit, when most of them have only gotten more surveillance. One day "indirectly" was just no longer true through no fault of millions of people. And growing as fast as the money stream will allow.

Up until recently AI was way more niche and fewer ordinary consumers were exposed, where now there are millions more aware of its influence and growing fast. But the more aware more ordinary people become, millions more opinions are going to come to the surface and need to be dealt with.

>whale economy.

Thar she blows!

One pervasive opinion is that so far it's made by rich people for rich people, and more so than most those who want to get rich quick are joining the bandwagon. Of course what consumers see in the media is only the "band directors" who are already rich to begin with, they set the example because they now want to get richer quicker and this is the vehicle they have chosen to do that. This is not unexpected, after all they always get what they want when it's things you have to be ungodly rich to do.

This makes for company valuations based more on optimism than anything else and once that has eclipsed underlying worth then any unforeseen bottlenecks or financing stumbles become highly magnified.

For one thing there may not be enough momentum to even fully build enough data centers to fulfill some players' plans for recouping such large investments, but at the same time AI's not going to really get good until data centers are not needed at all, which is so ominous there appears to be even more force being applied to encourage people to ignore things like this. Otherwise it could get too shocking.

This disparity in upside just plain instinctively sidelines more ordinary people as it builds, so the number of people who are just going to have to wait for AI and everything associated with it to start getting cheaper all the time becomes a force in itself. It'll be easy to notice without being a finance guru.

Until then gamble at your own risk :\

Rofl, I already went for cheaper Chinese solutions. I can achieve more than I could when I was giving OpenAI 20 bucks a month, and for a fraction of the price.

I have no idea why people still use ChatGPT or Claude.

[dead]

I spent $18k in credits last month, I have 3x 20x Anthropic accounts (for Fable to bypass limits) which runs me another $600ish p/m and then a chatgpt pro account another $200 p/m. The value I got out of it is easily 1-200x what I paid.

You can now, as of this week, run locally models with the same performance of a SOTA model of March this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229621

The FAFO day of Anthropic and OpenAI arrived.