Live data from Hacker News

AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

thestateofbrand.com

371–380 of 426 posts

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#372

[flagged]

> Tokens will get cheaper > it costs OpenAI less money to serve GPT-5.5 than GPT-4 > Ppl don't understand how much efficiency gains are being made I guess "ppl" also don't understand then, with all the supposed "efficiency gains" and "tokens getting cheaper" how come MS GH Copilot is switching everyone to token-based billing? Must be because those tokens are so damn cheap, innit?

The fact you are trying to use Copilot as an example here shows you don't understand how Copilot's previous billing worked.

Previously they used "premium requests" which would allow you to make a request to one of the more expensive models. People abused the shit out of this because a request was disconnected from tokens.

You could make one request which used tens of dollars worth of tokens, obviously not the intended usage pattern and obviously unsustainable.

Tokens for a given intelligence level are becoming much cheaper very quickly, but everyone wants to use the smartest frontier models so tokens are not dirt cheap. Even frontier models are a bit cheaper in absolute terms than they previously were, and much cheaper in terms of intelligence.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#373
post #18

I think I'm going to puke if I see one more "It's not X. It's Y." phrase or the word "load-bearing" used metaphorically.

please stop giving hints on LLM writing markers, let's not do their adversarial training for free

AI companies are more than aware of those telltale signs by now though

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#374
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like witnessing a rocket using the most powerful engine on Earth then once it escaped orbit turn off the engine and said "It is flying without power!". Yes, sure, right now it is ... but that's NOT how it got here. There are trillions invested to recoup and at most billions in sales. It doesn't add up to tokens making a profit any time soon.

> There are trillions invested to recoup and at most billions in sales. It doesn't add up to tokens making a profit any time soon But this isn't "a ticking time bomb for enterprise." It's an issue for the AI companies' investors.

That's not an excuse to pillage the commons.

Steal from, you know, people who actually work.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#375
post #79

Every AI subscription is a ticking time bomb for the frontier provider; within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden. The floor will fall out of the enterprise market for all the frontier companies.

I can only hope that you'll be right someday. As of now, an RTX 3090 struggles to run most of the good local models.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#376
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local modals are 6 months to 18 months behind frontier. Even if the performance of a cloud model is faster, it's clear that local is catching up.

> Local modals are 6 months to 18 months behind frontier. I wish this was true but it is not. And I am working on open source models so if anything, I would have a bias towards agreeing with you. Frontier closed models (GPT/Claude) are gaining distance to everybody else. Even Google, once the king. Your claim is a meme coming from benchmark results and sadly a lot of models are benchmaxxed. Llama 4, and most notably…

Local models are ~18-24 months behind the frontier on approximate intelligence, and then like 36-48 months behind the frontier on inference speed for nice hardware.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#377
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Local modals are 6 months to 18 months behind frontier. I wish this was true but it is not. And I am working on open source models so if anything, I would have a bias towards agreeing with you. Frontier closed models (GPT/Claude) are gaining distance to everybody else. Even Google, once the king. Your claim is a meme coming from benchmark results and sadly a lot of models are benchmaxxed. Llama 4, and most notably…

I’ve worked, for a long time professionally, in the open model space for 3 years and up to 2 months ago I would have agreed with you. But it’s empirically not the case today. These models (combined with a good harness) have dramatically improved in both power and performance. Gemma 4 was a major improvement is self-hostable local models and Qwen-3.6-A34B is a beast, and runs great on an MBP (and insanely well on a 40…

For specific use cases, absolutely, a harness and other techniques help (this is literally what I'm working on). But GP was talking about general use.

Over-promising is a very stupid thing. Nobody will value the intermediate steps. Nobody will value all the effort because they will always compare us with frontier models made with billions and we will become a running joke. So please stop.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is selling these with enterprise trappings? What you're describing evaporated 2+ months ago. Everything is metered for enterprise users now. If there happens to be a stray vendor offering this I'd wager 2 things. 1) it's about to be phased out. 2) model limits will be in place so even that $200 plan won't go very far.

Are we talking about the same thing? I just double-checked Anthropic still offers per-seat plans. So does OpenAI though they split the Codex-only plan away from per-seat. Gemini does as well. There’s pooled usage over certain limits but it’s still a good deal to upgrade the seat of a heavy user. What happened two months ago?

Anthropic's Enterprise plan is per-seat, but that's just for access, isn't it? The actual usage per seat is billed at API rates. https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9797531-what-is-the-e...

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#379

Although I agree with the sentiment in the article, it smells very LLM~y. Especially the sections and punchlines. Such as: `That is not a rounding error. That is a line item that needs its own budget code.`

Pangram flags this as 100% AI generated with high confidence.

Re: AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise

#380
post #79

Every AI subscription is a ticking time bomb for the frontier provider; within a few years we will be running local models as good as today’s frontier models with almost no cost burden. The floor will fall out of the enterprise market for all the frontier companies.

The economic question is whether the average company will have the time or talent to roll their own models instead of eating the cost increases. The firms in question are exactly the same that have already decimated their teams. Can they so quickly pivot to self-hosted models if their AI workloads suddenly cost them 10x more? I bet most will simply start shoveling themselves deeper.
Post reply on HN