It's hard to take this piece seriously if he's citing _Ed Zitron's_ math, and equally hard to make the blanket statement that flat-rate plans = "the current AI pricing". But yes, those pricing models were pretty silly and unsustainable.
Get back to me when there's an AI company that's actually profitable and we can compare their service and pricing.
Claiming that there's some small subset of their services (like inference per token) that's "profitable" doesn't mean anything when it relies on everything else that company is still paying for. If you could make money from it at current prices - why aren't they?
Otherwise it's just "how much they're willing to subsidize".
Get back to me when there's an AI company that's actually profitable and we can compare their service and pricing.
Claiming that there's some small subset of their services (like inference per token) that's "profitable" doesn't mean anything when it relies on everything else that company is still paying for. If you could make money from it at current prices - why aren't they?
Otherwise it's just "how much they're willing to subsidize".