I learned today that the Anthropic "Enterprise" plan - the one big companies use because they need governance features and audit logs and all of that jazz - is billed at API token rates (plus $20/seat/month).

So large companies are getting billed a lot more than those discount subscription plans.

> Lastly, there is a massive difference in capabilities, determinism, and error handling between 5T SOTA models like Opus

What's your source for Opus being a 5T model?

> and tiny distillations from DeepSeek that perform well only in benchmarks.

I don't think you know what you're talking about. Local models aren't “distillations from Deepseek”.

And they don't perform well “only in benchmarks”, Qwen 3.6 is a very decent model (obviously it's not Opus, but it's also much faster and speed is a quality of its own).

Its not like the non frontier are not improving. If someone can use deepseek to get 90% of the work done for $100 then pay another $100 to anthropic or openai to complete it I think they will rather do that than pay anthropic or openai for $1000.

> The subscription token price is 10x-40x cheaper than API pricing

This is a temporary phenomenon. Expect either drastic price increases or draconian throttling or both in the coming months.

These companies are operating at huge loses and have hundreds of billions in liabilities and commitments. They need to turn on the money faucet sooner than later.

> When discussing LLM pricing, people are missing the plot. [ ... snipped ...] Your 90$ Claude subscriptions give you close to $1000 to $4000 in equivalent API token pricing.

And you think it is unreasonable to consider this unsustainable?

Also, your local hardware is in no way capable of running the types of models that the cloud providers do, it’s just not economically feasible, and it never will be.

Isn't the plot that it's like an infinite bikeshed but 10% of the biksheds are actually trailer parks and when you finally realize it's a trailer park and not a bike shed you're down 10-100$ because it's token gen is faster than you can actually validate?

Some might say the price wouldn't be great if you could actually process and validate it...

> The quality of the model “operator” makes a massive difference in the outcomes.

My hunch is that this is the source of much of the variability in outcomes upstream of HN commenters claiming extremes of, "This model changes everything!" to "This[same] model is crap."

We haven't operationalized what it means to "be good at prompting," nor developed proxies/heuristics/shibboleths for accessing prompting skill. There's community skepticism over whether prompting skill even exists. Besides even if prompting skill is real, who wants to hear, "Actually you kinda suck at prompting."