It seems silly to say we have no idea when we actually do, though. We know how much hardware costs, we know how to reliably run a webservice that hits an API hosted on a machine with a GPU, we know how to operate these things at scale outside of OpenAI and Anthropic (not Nvidia). VC money can be patient, Uber's profitable, yeah $1 Uber rides got us hooked and they're running the same playbook. Unfortunately the convenience is worth paying for, so it seems dumb to think we can control the beast or ignore it, or get everyone to agree to hold back.

Is there a world where OpenAI starts charging $2,000/month for what we previously were paying $20 for? What are we going to do? AWS could totally jack up the prices for EC2 instances as well, but we've come to rely on that as well.