alt Hacker NewsI wonder if GitHub (Microsoft) is implicitly betting that enterprise demand is sticky enough to absorb these rates, especially given that Opus 4.6 “fast” was being listed at a 27x multiplier. Maybe they saw enough usage at that price point to conclude the demand is real. Or maybe the strategy is to keep the enterprise customers who can justify it while shedding heavier individual and power-user usage.
The interesting question is how long it takes enterprises to notice the capability/pricing tradeoff, and whether they respond by limiting access to the strongest models internally.
The part that worries me is that this market is still very early. Most developers and organizations are still learning how to use these tools effectively. Raising the experimentation cost this much may slow down the discovery process that makes the tools valuable in the first place.
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I also suspect that there are many "slow-moving", Microsoft heavy enterprises but with in-house devs that can't get anything but Copilot approved, and Microsoft trusts this will remain so.
It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
yes. even in my province that's relatively behind on tech, at least +-20% were already strongly relying on Microsoft (Azure) and thought adopting Copilot was a no-brainer. That ofcourse comes with autonomous programming, because we're paying for it anyway!
These companies already lost the spark/innovation years ago. They're just using LLM's as a way to survive. Wonder how long that lasts.
Opus 4.6 "Fast" was originally at 10x, literally the same cost as Opus 4.1. After promotion period, it was 30x.
As someone that is on the enterprise side in a non-tech F500 company, what I'm seeing is some FOMO and need to be part of the hype cycle. We're about to plonk a bunch of money on more Copilot licenses. Something got in the water where all the C-levels the past two months are pushing everyone to use AI but when they bring up examples of their uses its like "I use it to rewrite my emails" or prompt 'engineering' ideas that point more to patching over poor processes, data management, and decision-making within the organization or not.
What we're seeing across the board is every software company tossing AI onto their name or sales pitch and no one understanding what that actually means. But we will spend money on it because of FOMO.
I really question if we're reaching the end of the hype cycle to the point. I wish I were brave enough to put money on it. It feels like there was a command from up top to 'do something with AI' and leadership is scambling for some resume-building projects vs doing the hard work they should've done the past two years at a people and process level.
Subsidies stop when LLMs improvement plateaued (though they still benchmark higher somehow). At some point, you have to make money or at least break even; and I think they concluded that we reached that point.
I really hope that they think so and that they're wrong and they get burned hard. Them and all the AI labs that lied, stole, inflated, hoarded and tried to justify all this as an existential moment where AGI would radically change society. I hope their calculus to reel in paying users is all wrong and now they all crash and burn instead of recouping VC money.
As someone who works in a Microsoft shop with Copilot, I am curious to see what happens.
Due to data governance it will be difficult to move to a different provider.
At the same time, this price hike is so large that the ROI on copilot will be a net negative.
I think what will ultimately happen is that we will not pay Microsoft more than we currently do and we'll simply end up with less AI usage in the company and a reduction in productivity.