61–70 of 71 posts
Assuming this essay is prophetic: I'm glad I am no longer a professional programmer. I never wanted to be a businessman (which brings up visions of suits and midday bourbons).
The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…
You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either.
The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's gonna be a lot worse with LLMs. Mainly because they're substantially under charging, I don't think the cost of operating is going to drop much, and the workflows are only going to get more token hungry. The incentives here are also fucking atrocious. They aren't incentivised to make the model as good as possible. It's in their best interest to tune so it's good enough to not drive you off, but bad enough…
> I think it's gonna be a lot worse with LLMs It wont: if/when LLMs start to get too expensive, people will just migrate to open models, run it local, etc. I see no scenario where we are held hostage by the main providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it's gonna be a lot worse with LLMs It wont: if/when LLMs start to get too expensive, people will just migrate to open models, run it local, etc. I see no scenario where we are held hostage by the main providers.
I was a lot more worried about this when only OpenAI and Anthropic had truly great models - but now we also have Google and five different Chinese AI labs who are releasing open weight models that are in the same ballpark as the OpenAI and Anthropic ones. I think we'll be fine.
The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…
> They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal. You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either. The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.
As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.
The core of the entire argument is that the $150/hour is based on a developers ability to physically write code, which is not true. Having something that can generate code reliabily (which these things can barely do even with an expert at the wheel) doesn't address any of the actual hard problems we deal with on a daily basis. Plus running AI tools is going to get much more expensive. The current prices aren't sustai…
Open source AI is getting cheaper and cheaper. Model companies run inference at a profit, the lack of profitability from AI companies is just due to them putting all their capital into training the next generation of models.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree on your first point: software development is so much more than writing code. LLMs are a threat to programmers for whom the job is 8 hours a day of writing code to detailed specifications provided by other people. I can't remember any point in my own career where I worked with people who got to do that. There's a great example of that in the linked post itself: > Let's build a property-based testing s…
I get your point, but I don't think the pricing is long term viable. We're in the burn everything to the ground to earn market share phase. Once things start to stabilize and there is no more user growth, they'll start putting the screws to the users. I said the same thing about Netflix in 2015 and Gamepass in 2020. It might have taken a while but eventually it happened. And they're gonna have to raise prices higher…
Gamepass, same thing.
Those are completely incomparable businesses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're in the "get 'em hooked" stage of the drug deal. You're implying that people are selling inference at below cost right now. That's certainly not true for most third-party inference providers. I doubt API pricing at Anthropic or OpenAI is being solid below cost either. The only place where you get what you're talking about are the fixed price plans OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, etc. sell.
OpenAI is claiming they'll post 74 billion in loses through 2028. Anthropic is on course to lose 3 billion by the end of this year, they lost 5 billion last year. As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.
Inference itself will keep getting cheaper.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI is claiming they'll post 74 billion in loses through 2028. Anthropic is on course to lose 3 billion by the end of this year, they lost 5 billion last year. As far as I can tell the inference provider landscape is a fucking mess, and I can't find any decent financial information on any of the ones I tried. So unless you have something showing those companies are profitable I'm not buy it.
Their big spend isn't inference. It is the training, which they can pull back on at any time. Inference itself will keep getting cheaper.
They have one method of monitization right now, and there is no clear evidence that their costs are suddenly going to decrease anytime soon. Despite claims to the contrary, no one has actually provided any evidence of a pathway to those costs magically cutting in half over the next few years.
The entire industry is being propped up by insane over investment and an obsession with growth at all costs. Investments will dry up sooner or later, and you can't grow forever.