None of this matters. Open weights will continue to be released. I don't need to have the absolute greatest LLM. I run Qwen3 locally and that's not even the best Qwen.
You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
41–50 of 92 posts
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#42If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do) This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning tha…
> This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech.
But what powers the chips?
You're talking about chip economics. Inference economics requires electricity dynamics.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> billionares use the same iPhones as you do! Not if they have the brain disease which makes this kind of thing appealing: https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/?sort=... Yes that flagship model incorporates an actual Rolex Daytona in solid gold.
For me, it's London. > https://caviar.global/catalog/custom-iphone/iphone-17/london...
Both of these are great, true expressions of a total void of taste
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Everything points to commoditization of models. Open/distilled models lag behind frontier only by 6-12 months. Yes, but every high performing open weights model coming out of China has (supposedly) been caught distilling frontier models. It seems like a lot of people are making assumptions about the state of the open weights ecosystem based on information that may not be accurate. And if the big labs are able to rel…
> And if the big labs are able to reliably block distillation, The big labs will not be able to reliably block distillation without further inhibiting general use of the models, which itself will help tip the balance away from commercial models.
No, you're wrong. It won't tip it away from commercial models. Trying to run open weight modesl to do inference is something 99% of people around the world can't do because it's expensive and technically challenging and the results are poor compared to the main companies. If they get rid of free usage people will simply pay for it.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#45I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
Same thing can be said about it a personal computer
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#46It's possible that prices will go up (although the cost of pure inference tends to go down; the question is more how to amortize the cost of training new models).
But this is absurd:
> the cheapest usable tier of Claude Code is $100/mo
If you pay by the token instead of with a subscription, and don't send the entirety of your code base with each request, costs are ridiculously low. Like, $50 will last a minimum of 3 months of heavy use on openrouter.
It's also far from certain everyone needs the latest version of the best "frontier model"; it very much depends on what you do.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#47The one saving grace I see here is that open models are getting really good, and they're already profitable at an affordable price. So maybe it's true you won't get "the best", but I don't think you'll be that far off.
There's this weird race where I have in my head some level of LLM performance which is "good enough" and the open models keep improving to that level, but by the time that they do my "good enough" has acclimatized to what I'm used to doing with the latest frontier models and what the open models are isn't good enough anymore.
The "good enough" points so far have been
- "as good as ChatGPT"
- "as good as GPT4"
- "as good as Sonnet 3.5"
- "as good as Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2"
Anyway, we'll see where the chinese models are in a year, and we'll see where my expectations are. Hopefully they overlap at some point.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#48"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.
Or ad-supported LLMs where you can't guarantee the answer isn't sponsored.
Why doesn't the same caveat apply to a paid account?
I mean, you have to declare when content is an advert, and if you are asserting that the owners of the chatbot are going to just ignore that requirement, won't they just do the same thing for paid accounts?
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#49I saw a quote today that resonated with me: "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth. --@jeffowski" While I don't think that's the only purpose, I can't help but think that people that become dependent on these tools will have neither wealth nor skill. Keep your skills sharp!
That just sounds like "controlling the means of production" with more clever wordplay.
Re: You are going to get priced out of the best AI coding tools (2025)
#50If you know anything about tech, you will know that tech as an industry is highly deflationary--billionares use the same iPhones as you do! (in contrast, they don't drive the same cars you do) This boils down to the fact that chip fabs have massive fixed costs and near-zero marginal costs, and these chips power all of tech. So the more chips they can produce for a given fab, the more profit they can make, meaning tha…
> competition drives price decreases
This is something that is often cited as trueism, but there is no natural laws which makes this a necessary true. There is plenty of room for black swans in market laws. So much so that the term black swan is probably better known in the field of economy then any other field.
Competition may drive down the price of LLMs, however there is a greater then zero probability that it won‘t, and if it won’t, your whole counter-argument falls apart.