They're cheaper right now because they're operating at a loss. At some point, the bill will come due.
Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.
Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.
Yes they'll be cheaper to run, but will they be cheaper buy as a service?
Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.
From a simple correlational extrapolation compute has only gotten more cheaper over time. Massively so actually.
From a more reasoned causal extrapolation hardware companies historically compete to bring the price of compute down. For AI this is extremely aggressive I might add. HotChips 2024 and 2025 had so much AI coverage. Nvidia is in an arms race with so many companies.
All over the last few years we have literally only ever seen AI get cheaper for the same level or better. No one is releasing worse and more expensive AI right now.
Literally just a few days ago Deepseek halved the price of V3.2.
AI expenses have grown but that's because human's are extremely cognitively greedy. We value our time far more than compute efficiency.
You don't seriously believe that last few years have been sustainable? The market is in a bubble, companies are falling over themselves offering clinically insane deals and taking enormous losses to build market share (people are allowed to spend ten(s) of thousands of dollars in credits on their $200/mo subscriptions with no realistic expectation of customer loyalty).
What happens when investors start demanding their moonshot returns?
They didn't invest trillions to provide you with a service at break-even prices for the next 20 years. They'll want to 100x their investment, how do you think they're going to do that?
Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.
Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.