Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI's Affordability Crisis

blog.dshr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 436 posts

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#171

Post by steveBK123 »

wongarsu wrote: post #75
steveBK123 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it probably doesn't help that Dario is going around on podcasts saying things like "frontier labs need $1T of revenue or they will go bankrupt" lol.

Which is just a flashy way to say "we have low margins and lots of overhead". Considering how much they spend on sales, marketing and R&D that doesn't sound that absurd

My point is that $1T of revenue is A LOT. Apple & Google each only did $400B revenue in 2025. Facebook did $200B. Think of how many decades it took the 3 to get there.

So depending on how literally we interpret Darios comment, OpenAI & Anthropic need to get to Apple+Google+Meta revenue numbers in like single digit years?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#172

Post by MadxX79 »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #137
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…

GM just did this in the last 30 days [1], and their sales are likely going to be just fine. In fact the auto industry has repeatedly automated jobs over the last 100 years, and they still make decent sales numbers. If you decided to boycott every company that replaced staff with automation, you would be forced to exit the economy. Every company does this to some degree and the customers who vote with their wallet do…

Robots that replace auto industry factory workers exist; the CEO of GM didn't imagine them as part of some sort of business media induced psychotic episode.

The same is not true for the software industry execs.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#173

Post by akazantsev »

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.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#174

Post by dualvariable »

jschveibinz wrote: post #5

I don't have a crystal ball, but based on similar historical scenarios, I think that one or two of these companies will win--probably because of some unique application, delivery or trade secret that will drive 80% of their revenue. Consider Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. It's still early days...

I'd guess Anthropic will probably win, and LLMs will probably still be with us and be much better in 10 years time.

But next year we could be in the middle of a massive $600B/yr capital-spending bubble deflating hard with unemployment accelerating towards 10% (or higher).

The internet never failed, but the telcom/dotcom collapse still happened in 2001.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#175

Post by dualvariable »

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

And corporations could run DeepSeek models on cloud hardware.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#176

Post by burningChrome »

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 teams were building the same tools for what they thought was nothing.

Then they signed contracts with Anthropic and Google because I would assume they saw the token usage was through the roof. One month later? They completely cut off access to everybody for both Claude and Gemini. If you wanted access? Suddenly it was several forms, along with several approvals and a rock solid business case why you needed it. And before you got to the forms? You were added to a waiting list that was thousands of people long.

The entire company is now in damage control after trying to get the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing someone saw how much we would be paying for the tokens we'd been using and decided to shut the party down so to speak.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#177

Post by johnvanommen »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #137
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…

GM just did this in the last 30 days [1], and their sales are likely going to be just fine. In fact the auto industry has repeatedly automated jobs over the last 100 years, and they still make decent sales numbers. If you decided to boycott every company that replaced staff with automation, you would be forced to exit the economy. Every company does this to some degree and the customers who vote with their wallet do…

> GM just did this in the last 30 days [1], and their sales are likely going to be just fine. In fact the auto industry has repeatedly automated jobs over the last 100 years, and they still make decent sales numbers.

I worked at Verizon during their layoffs last year. Biggest layoffs in the USA.

As someone who’s been laid off before, I knew that it generally boosts the stock price.

I bought VZ because of that. It’s up 15% since the layoffs.

Microsoft, an AI stock, is down 30% in the same timeframe.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#178

Post by brainwad »

verdverm wrote: post #145
rich_sasha wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, making sense of finances of fully public companies is often hard, because in practice, accounting is hard. How you account for depreciacion, cost, investment, fixed vs marginal costs is in practice fluid, companies have an incentive to make it look attractive, while also optimising for tax and shifting revenue around to narrowly beat analyst recommendations. Here's a concrete example. Does some random A…

I saw some commentary that their free cash flow is misleading because it doesn't subtract the stock compensation they are paying to attract / keep top AI talent. Their point was also that deciphering financial statements is hard

Why would it? Stock compensation doesn't affect cash flow, it just dilutes the shareholders.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#179

Post by orangecat »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #82
827a wrote: post #71

> Zitron's numbers don't tell us the real cost of generating tokens but, subject to the assumption that the platforms are not subsidizing the token price, that means Anthropic is subsidizing their enterprise customers by up to 40 times, and OpenAI up to 70 times Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI are subsidizing enterprise customers. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI allow Business nor Enterprise customers access to the high va…

> it may underestimate the inference margins of Ant/OAI's API pricing. If true then why are neither Anthropic or OpenAI dropping their API pricing to gain market share when both are clearly doing all sorts of political and PR maneuvering to compete in a cutthroat market? Since they aren't dropping the API usage prices (and are in fact raising them in a lot of subtle ways) then one of these options almost has to be tr…

If true then why are neither Anthropic or OpenAI dropping their API pricing

They are? In the before times of 2025, Opus 4.1 was $75 per million tokens. Opus 4.8 is $25, and Fable is/was $50.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#180

Post by SwellJoe »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #104
jcfrei wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already open weight models out there that are capable and cheap enough for a lot of coding tasks. Not as good as Claude but not far from it. There's no going back to pre-AI coding.

I can't speak for everyone, but for most of my coding tasks, Claude is just barely good enough. There's no going all the way back, and perhaps open weight models will keep improving, but at least 50% of my work would be better done by hand than by a worse-than-Claude agent.

I consider Opus 4.5 the crossover point where coding with agents got more efficient than not coding with agents. They were too stupid before that, and wasted more time than they saved for anything beyond a basic CRUD app or HTML page.

Certainly, the best models have gotten better since then, but I wouldn't consider DeepSeek V4 Pro or GLM 5.2 to be a big enough downgrade to be worse than coding by hand. I'm willing to spend a premium for the best model for coding because it wastes less of my time with dumb stuff, so I've got a Claude subscription. But, there is a limit to how much of a premium I'll pay. 10x over Chinese models? OK, fine. Opus saves me enough time to make it worth a couple hundred bucks a month. But, 100x, or more? Nah. I'll go a little slower, review the PRs a little more carefully.

And, open weights models do keep improving. DeepSeek V4 Pro is a notable improvement over earlier DeepSeek models, and the first DeepSeek model to cross the "better to work with it than without it" threshold into Opus 4.5 (or better) territory. GLM 5.2 is somewhere in the ballpark of Opus 4.6 (though without vision, a notable limitation for anything that requires a UI).

Post reply on HN