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But fundamentally AI compute is a commodity. GPUs are made in factories at scale. Assuming AI quality tapers off eventually supply will catch up to demand.
Finally open weights models are good enough that the leading labs cannot charge high margins.
I think Warhol’s quote is nostalgic but incomplete. I’m priced out of the best cars, best houses, best home theater systems, best schools. Even someone making $300k/year can’t afford all of the best of everything. Sure, the iPhone has been “the best” possible phone which was also used by nearly everyone, but I think that’s an anomaly even in the short run. Right now I’m paying $200/mo for Claude code to do an amount…
At this price point, it will be cheaper to hire a bunch of actual PhDs. The vast majority who will not earn anything close to 250k per year in most of the world.
Businesses will pay more since they can justify the cost. That seems fine?
"OpenAI reportedly discussed charging $20k/month on PhD-level research agents with investors." I've been wondering about this, that there might be a day when certain models are sold at a much higher price, like luxury cars, and only people who are willing to pay a lot of money get them. Everyone else has to settle for a cheaper LLM.
Unless you’re a top-tier domain expert. Then you’re safe until (if…) ASI.
Anyway, it might be worth it to invest in an LLM rig today if you’re paranoid.
Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months.
Regulatory capture is the only thing I’m scared of with regards to tooling options and cost.
It is correct to say there's near-infinite demand for AI, and supply is limited. It stands to reason that wealthier people will pay more, and therefore get more, out of AI.
However, this has always been true, but historically instead of AI it's been workers. The economics of labor haven't changed. So it will, as always, be a game of how you deploy the workers you hire. Are you generating useless morning briefs or are you actually generating value for yourself and others with the AI you buy? If you generate more value that the tokens you burn, you'll get ahead.
This will be true in academia as well, the area of interest to the author. He writes like, before AI, grad student level intelligence came for free.
Ok, wait, sorry, bad example...
> The top tier subscription prices are increasing exponentially WILD graph that misrepresents what is happening. There's a bunch of $20 subscriptions, and a bunch of $200 subscriptions. Devin has a $500 subscription. That's it. The cost per unit of intelligence has been dropping every month. The cost per "completed task" has also been dropping. There is no sign of this reversing course. Graphing the price of a subscr…
Although there is an underlying truth: using LLMs for large-context tasks like coding is still extremely expensive.