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AI's Affordability Crisis

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Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#181

Post by mh- »

dominotw wrote: post #166
solidasparagus wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serving the API is profitable. They are unprofitable because of R&D (and maybe subscription costs?). If they can continue to find access to R&D capital, there is space to reduce API costs.

how do you have access to their financials? are you an insider? Edit: to the commenter below . It was widely reported that these companies were unprofitable 1 from last year. I am asking question to this specefic comment because they made a very specific claim about part of plan thats profitable . something only an insider would know. 1. https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-anthropic-profitability-e...

I'm curious why you didn't pose this question to the grandparent commenter, who first asserted the opposite?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#182

Post by yalogin »

The issue is the cost is not going to be a hindrance for companies that have gone all in on the AI development. They may still find it cheaper than hiring engineers and if needed they will layoff a few more.

The companies that did not yet jump on this bandwagon and are still evaluating will have a decision to make.

No matter what the AI companies are going to change their pricing strategy and it’s going to become a lot lot more expensive to use. I am just hoping the price stays like this until I am done with my big chunk of work

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#183

Post by sdesol »

burningChrome wrote: post #176
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment. I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because tea…

Was there at least performance gains to be measured?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#184

Post by deadmutex »

oreally wrote: post #135
deweywsu wrote: post #124

I know a lot of level-headed engineers here may not side with me, but I say let the companies who abandoned their people at the drop of a hat, with CEOs who waved their flag around on social media, proudly declaring how they'd now run their companies with 75% fewer employees wither and die. If I had been let go, there's no way I'd go back to a company like that, and there should be a black list of CEOs who acted this…

Someone should keep track of a public database of CEOs who cut workforce while making huge profits. Name, context, situation and all.

Unfortunately, maintaining an opposite list would probably be easier.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#185

Post by dns_snek »

solidasparagus wrote: post #116
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are Anthropic and OpenAI going to compete on price when they're both already deeply unprofitable?

Serving the API is profitable. They are unprofitable because of R&D (and maybe subscription costs?). If they can continue to find access to R&D capital, there is space to reduce API costs.

Nuclear energy is really cheap too... as long as you ignore CapEx, would you like to invest?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#186

Post by johnvanommen »

sdesol wrote: post #127
thewebguyd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hardware becomes the moat, the US frontier labs are screwed. We have AWS, Azure, GCP. All three have or are making inference silicon. LLMs become just another service in the public cloud's large service catalog, and open weight wins. Which makes sense to me. Selling a chatbot interface/model access to the general public was never going to be a viable long term play. You still need developers to wrap the models int…

The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China and think a lot of people will not forgive Samsung and others, so I can see China owning a good portion of the supply chain.

> The big thing is, the western world has moved so much of the manufacturing to China

I built my career on Solaris and it got rugpulled by Linux.

That wasn’t because of software, it was because of hardware. Linux’s cost advantage existed because Sun hardware had huge margins, because their software was basically free.

AI will probably be a repeat of this. Whoever can come up with the hardware solution that minimizes the cost per token will win.

I believe the 5090 still holds this crown, but someone certainly knows better than I do.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#187

Post by dns_snek »

brainwad wrote: post #170
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are Anthropic and OpenAI going to compete on price when they're both already deeply unprofitable?

Anthropic just announced it's on track to have its first profitable quarter: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

Response: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle...

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#188

Post by SwellJoe »

akazantsev wrote: post #173
chermi wrote: post #143

Lol I feel like no one has any attention span here. Tech shit is expensive in the beginning when it's new. It gets cheaper with time. This is a tech forum, don't we know this? Of course people overreact in both directions on both sides of the issue. It's a very fast technology, wait for things to settle before making grand declarations.

> Lol I feel like no one has any attention span here. Tech shit is expensive in the beginning when it's new. It gets cheaper with time. The funniest comment here. Have you seen the prices of the technical shit for the past two years? Dang, GPUs are not getting any cheaper, but more expensive with each year.

That's an artificially inflated market. OpenAI and xAI bought everything for like two years into the future, partly to inflate the AI bubble, partly to lock-in a monopoly on the kinds of compute you need for AI, and partly to scale up actual operations. They can't realistically keep buying all the RAM in the world forever, the money has to run out eventually (though the market can remain irrational for quite a long time and can keep giving OpenAI and Apartheid Clyde money well past the point of reason).

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#189

Post by thewebguyd »

a34729t wrote: post #168

Deepseek is 90% cheaper, and nearly as good for coding tasks as claude/codex, and as good given the right plan. The only moat OpenAI and Anthropic have is regulation. If the Chinese really eant to hammer us, they could realse the full training data and pipeline.

Even without doing that the Chinese are already going to impact our labs presence everywhere else in the world. With Fable getting pulled, any model coming out of the US is now unreliable and untrusted. No one in any other country would in their right mind choose OpenAI or Anthropic for anything.

The big push for regulation and export controls is only going to ensure OpenAI & Anthropic are more like the automakers. Only in business because of protectionism, left to screw over US consumers meanwhile the rest of the world gets to enjoy cheap EVs

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#190

Post by kappar »

verdverm wrote: post #157
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could Trump ban tiktok then? And Fable for that matter. Maybe you're somehow legally allowed to distribute and download the weights, but most of us can't run GLM 5.2 at home.

You won't need a frontier size model for most tasks before long. Qwen 3.6 (small) punches way above its weight. I run it at home @8bit on an OEM Spark

Second this, I am also running qwen 3.6 35b Q8 on a 5090 liquid getting around 250 tokens / second and it is plenty capable. I actually haven't even looked at models recently because I am happy with what I have.

And.. now I feel the need to look again. Darn, there goes my afternoon

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