alt Hacker NewsI'm betting my startup on it. The subsidised model subscription will start to dry out and providers will lean heavier into locking down how they want their models to be used (Anhropic has been paving the way already). The only way forward is open weight models. If you are working on any LLM powered product be careful betting on utilising user subscriptions.
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sanderjd • yesterday at 2:11 PM
What is your startup?
Maybe you know something I don't, but it seems the standard will continue to be a large number of companies hosting and reselling LLMs as both subscription plans and pay-as-you-go. It's virtually identical to the mobile market: the economics of the business require a large regular infusion of cash, and limits are used to prevent a minority of users from making the service unusable/unprofitable. A few giants are the most expensive but offer the most features, and cheap providers offer less for less. All of this will happen because people constantly want "more": more bandwidth, more quality, etc. Capitalism rewards this constant growth/advancement with constantly increasing bills.
Anthropic is going to go out of business by probably Q1 2027 due to not paying their bills. OpenAI will become a new Oracle, serving a luxury product for enterprises and governments. Google and Microsoft will keep doing what Google and Microsoft do. Chinese vendors will capture a significant amount of business over the next 10 years by running the models in non-Chinese DCs, with demand coming from their much lower prices. 95% of regular users will be paying for open model subscriptions, even if their local machine can run the model, because the providers will be offering features that are hard to impossible to replicate locally.