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AI's Affordability Crisis

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Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#361

Post by trollbridge »

ignoramous wrote: post #354
trollbridge wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.) Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I’m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics). The nontechnical s…

> Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month. Team size, if you don't mind? > We're having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively Are you evaluating Alibaba's token plan ($50/mo) which includes Qwen3, MiniMax M2, Kimi K2, and GLM5 series.

6 people, 3 programmers, 3 non programmers who now use AI as much as anyone else.

I have not yet checked out Alibaba’s plans. We’re still just using OpenCode Go for GLM-5.2 and Qwen-3.7-Max.

I haven’t looked into MiniMax M3 much at all due to cost.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#362

Post by qurren »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #318
mkozlows wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month. Many companies are complaining at a point that's well, well below that. (I think they are being irrational, and that the mental model they have of AI costs -- "how much are we spending on tooling for this developer?" -- is going to shift over time to something more sensible, but those kinds of short-sighted companies are the ones that are having cost panics.)

> 10% of a developer's cost is something like $4000/month What company pays developers $40000/month and are they hiring?

> What company pays developers $40000/month

Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, Anthropic, Netflix, Nvidia, to name a few

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#363

Post by wseqyrku »

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…

You like to believe that these companies know what they're doing, they do not, I mean don't even try to find the logic behind their actions. They just follow the shiny things and then when it doesn't work, react by screwing up their employees. Their decisions age like milk on the countertop. After I got laid off a few month ago, I can't imagine myself working another 9 to 5. Because above all, it's an incredibly stupid way to spend your fleeting time here.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#364

Post by onion2k »

jcfrei wrote: post #87
onion2k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once your dependent, they can drive up the price just because. It doesn't need to be for existential reasons. This is the crisis point for vibe-coders. A developer can go back to writing code by hand, as horrible as that might sound. Someone who hasn't learned to code but builds with AI can't go back. They either pay or they stop. That will be an painful choice whichever way you fall.

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.

There aren't good alternatives for Claude Design, Cowork, Claude for Excel, etc. People who are properly 'AI-pilled' have outsourced far more than coding to their artificial teams.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#365

Post by esseph »

mynameisbilly wrote: post #39
whateveracct wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so how are these labs going to recoup the insane training costs at those prices? even if there is still a fat margin leftover afterwards

They also have to continuously train, forever, to avoid model drift. It's not a one and done thing as far as I'm aware.

Diminishing returns without some major efficiency gains.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#366

Post by asdff »

HDBaseT wrote: post #343
asdff wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works for you because you were trained in The Old Way. Consider the people younger than you. Who are literally shutting their brain off so AI can cheat on their essays and exams. They aren't going to be good architects or code reviewers.

This is some "old man yells at cloud" nonsense. There will always be proficient programmers who can read and write good as good as yourself. I have 0 reason to believe programmers coming out of University today are any less competent than when you came out of University.

Stanford is proctoring now because current day students could no longer be trusted to not cheat. UC professors are asking for SAT to be reinstated because students aren't prepared well and classes had to get dumbed down to be more remedial on these shortcomings they are bringing.

They are absolutely getting worse. Ask a teacher, at any level.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#367

Post by hhjinks »

KolibriFly wrote: post #233
woeirua wrote: post #218

It's not an affordability crisis, it's a financial crisis. The models get cheaper super fast. By this time next year Fable 5 will cost less than Sonnet does today. That's not the problem. The problem is that many companies are going to realize that they don't get any ROI from AI. Generating code faster != more profit. Most of the Fortune 500 will likely realize this and then the token budgets will come crashing down.…

I feel like this is way too binary. I don't have to write every line of code myself to understand the system. I don't write my own compiler HTTP stack or database either It's more about the level of abstraction. If AI handles 80% of the grunt work and I spend my time on architecture and reviews that's still a win

If my job devolves to reviewing AI code, I'm becoming a plumber.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#368

Post by simianwords »

3dss wrote: post #350
anthonypasq wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the demand for intelligence is infinite. you sound like someone in 1960 wondering what the hell we would even do with the functionally infinite cpu cycles we have available to us now.

Stupid poster. The demand for intelligence when price approaches zero is infinite.

Why calling names green account?

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#369

Post by belZaah »

There’s one more aspect to this. Look at Claude self-reported availability figures. It’s two nines at best, not enough to build something serious on top of. Historically, adding another 9 is an order of magnitude cost shift. Even in best case scenario, where a LLM scales much differently, you are looking at significant cost increases just to achieve something people would be willing to have their business depend on.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#370

Post by brokenmachine »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #317
bayarearefugee wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nobody cares about their training costs. Their collapse is the optimal outcome for humanity. Oligarchs blowing trillions on a godlike AI, only for the model to leak so that everyone with the hardware can use it, is literally the best case scenario.

How large is a model, like Mythos for example? Multiple Tb?

If that happened, what would people need to run it?

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