alt Hacker NewsI disagree on the consumer side and I honestly can't really comprehend why people aren't talking about subscription prices like they ARE the prices, as consumers (and startups), the price we pay for IS that price, that it's sustainable or not on providers side, that's another matter and not our concern.
The reality is that there is more and more subscriptions available everywhere, and for $400 you can easily get $10K of tokens from Openrouter/official API pricing, you can pile up as many subs as you want and there is virtually no constrain once you make CC an API, you don't need Claude Code, you don't need Codex, you don't need Antigravity, you don't need Kimi Code.
We use now about 20 subscriptions (mixed, around $5K) and we average $60K-100K in token a month, THAT is the price, that's what's debited from our account. There is also many providers that resell tokens for cheaper, why wouldn't that be the price for us consumers?
If that changes in 6 months, so be it, but the current price of AI is that one.
PS: Many enterprises (maybe not large scale) have at least 1-2 subscriptions for each of their employees, so it's not really only startups & consumers.
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I think the article is more about the cost for AI companies like OAI and Anthropic to operate relative to what they’re making (not much).
So in a way your argument that users are able to spend 10k in tokens while paying a sub of 200 is actually agreeing with his point.
If you are using AI like you use Netflix (something you like but can live without if it gets too expensive) then you have a point. But if you are relying on AI for your business, the cost of AI sooner or later is going to be passed on to you and it's going to impact your margins. And it's probably goong to be sooner, rather than later.
The amount of money these AI companies are burning is unprecedented and there is simply not enough money in the economy to keep it going at a loss for ten years. Google (Google!) went cash flow negative and is issuing bonds, basically asking for a loan. That's the reason markets are getting so nervous.
And yes, choice is good but how many of these new models are trained from scratch vs distilled from frontier models? If OpenAI and Anthropic go down in flames how much of the cheaper choices we see today are going to keep evolving? I am not trying to make a prediction either way, I am just pointing out the uncertainty. Which, again, is fine if AI is a commodity you can easily cut, but not great if your company is betting big on AI.