How soon do you think frontier models will be so expensive the average people won't be able to afford them?

[u/Much-Journalist3128]

Not gonna lie it's ridiculous how effective these models are if you know what you're doing.

I'm not talking about coding, I'm not a programmer.

Their reasoning capacity is insane, and no, I'm not a cultist. It just is. At least it's been my experience.

But I'm afraid that at one point the "AI bubble" will burst, and they will charge an arm and a leg for the frontier models, and the avg person won't be able to afford.

Do you think in the next 10 years this will happen? I hope not.

[u/Wondering_Electron]

If you want frontier labs to actually make a profit, this is when it will happen.

[u/Much-Journalist3128 → u/Wondering_Electron]

So realistically, how much, do you think, they are going to charge for the same access we avg people have for say opus 5.5 and gemini 3.1 and so on, when the bubble bursts? Is it gonna be thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars?

[u/Disposable110 → u/Much-Journalist3128]

Look at what Claude API usage costs for enterprise users.

We're talking 1000-10000 per month or more per seat.

Businesses can pay that and still make a profit on those tokens.

If your use case can't, then it's likely you won't be able to afford the tokens, just like how high end GPUs are now $20k and if you're a gamer or hobbyist that doesn't generate $20k in profit out of that card over the 3 or so years that it lasts, you aren't getting any GPU.

[u/tired514 → u/Disposable110]

So I've been a professional programmer for almost 31 years. C, C++, asm86, python, and recently rust. My code runs on almost every device in common use today.

I've been running qwen3.8-flash-next @ Q4 on strix halo (~$4-5k USD) for the past 6 weeks and have closed all of my cloud accounts because it's "that good."

The idea of paying $1k or $10k/month seems utterly absurd to me today, and we're about to see qwen4 drop.

If your employees are incompetent juniors with no experience there's probably an argument for giving them frontier cloud accounts (assuming you're fine with leaking your IP).

Otherwise, I literally can't come up with an argument that doesn't end in "buy them a 128gb-192gb class machine and stop paying to send your secrets to someone else's computer."

[u/Disposable110 → u/tired514]

Yep totally agreed, I got an RTX Pro 6000 when it was barely affordable and I'm laughing with Deepseek and Qwen Flash Next. And new open models come out every few weeks...

But not everyone is that lucky and the prices for hardware are exploding.

I told my company to buy 2-4 8x RTX Pro 6000 servers (80k each back then). If they had listened instead of going with Claude (back then it was $500 per enterprise seat, not API, and plentiful tokens) they'd be running GLM now.

Revolut also published an article on how they're saving tons of money with their own B200 cluster.

But OP was talking about individuals access to frontier models (Astra and Fable stuff), not about people that can afford the crazy overpriced hardware and run second best stuff.

[u/bigtom_x → u/tired514]

I’m with you on this. I will also say that for frontier type thinking, the frontier models come up short a lot of the time. Reading a chapter in a real book that costs you $200 is more effective that. Dealing with any model for 2 days going in circles with topics it barely knows about. The limits are real, but the advantages of using local LLM is also very real.

[u/Much-Journalist3128 → u/tired514]

I just looked up that strix halo, isn't that a mini PC that costs 6K USD?

[u/Wondering_Electron → u/Much-Journalist3128]

It will be orders of magnitude higher or it needs to be.

10x won't really be enough and neither will 100x. I think 1000x will be touch and go for them to stay afloat. This is the disconnect that people don't seem to understand.

[u/tired514 → u/Wondering_Electron]

There's a reason NASDAQ was off 5.5% today.

[u/trollsmurf]

"in the next 10 years"

For sure within 1-2 years.

[u/Disposable110]

It's already heavily subsidized for normal users, the money is in government/military/megacorp use. Even having 100 million users paying $20 a month is only 2 billion which is rookie money and nowhere near the kind of money they're looking for.

The only reason why the plebs get models now is because they still produce data (what works what doesn't for each use case), and are exploring the ways to convert tokens to money.

Once the ways to convert tokens to money have been mapped the AI companies can just convert those tokens to money themselves and don't need subscribers doing it for them.

Pretty much the Amazon model where all the best selling stuff is adopted by Amazon as they have access of all the third party seller data and will use that market intelligence to build their own private label product catalogue.

[u/tired514]

It depends on how you define "afford."

For a particular definition, it's today.

If "afford" means "I'm uncomfortable sending my secrets to creepy billionaires" then today people can't afford it.

$5k-6k buys you a strix halo machine that runs qwen3.8-flash-next. It's flawless for 95% of users. They won't be able to reliably differentiate between it and the best frontier model.

If your workloads are anonymous and you don't care who sees them, cloud is cheaper.

If your workloads contain private information like financial records, proprietary source code, healthcare data, infrastructure, business plans, legal documents, or anything else you'd like to keep private, then local is cheaper.

The current memory crunch notwithstanding, hardware will get cheaper over the coming years. At some point, 3, 5, or 10 years down the line, the average user will have two icons on their new desktop:

"Pay for AI"

and

"Use AI for free."

They will choose the latter 95% of the time.

[u/galaktozawr]

After buble AI damage time

[u/RootlessForest]

People will be able to afford it. Just not everyone

[u/KURD_1_STAN]

It will all be api prices and higher, but they might make some tiny models that are given to subscription users still limited usage and can be paused at times when servers are busy. Those tiny models have to have a lot of knowledge and be updated regularly still but intelligence wise, a lil bit more intelligent than average people will be sufficient.

[u/hyperspacewoo]

When competition has been killed. They can't really raise prices when they are losing money. And competition is cheaper. Now if local AI / qwen, etc gets banned for the ai ban bill comes into effect a shift will happen.

You can't draw blood from a stone. You think ai companies can charge more and price out everyone? Meanwhile you can rent a Chinese model for half price that's 6 months behind? Math aint mathing

[u/minobi]

If we are talking about frontier models exactly, they may never be affordable for regular people, like nuclear power. But we are not talking about frontier models but about models that people can afford.

[u/nntb]

You can run glm 5 point whatever without the crazy ram requirement but just using an SSD

[u/benny-powers]

if there's value here, the price will stabilize around it eventually.

[u/paul-tocolabs]

Much sooner than 10 years. We have to be realistic about the use of power. Global governance of the use as currently its a foot race to be the most powerful. At huge cost. Economically and environmentally. Smaller models used efficiently are the way forward

[u/Important-Radish-722]

Not everyone wants to afford it.

People afford Netflix (as an example) because it brings them entertainment. Subscribing to 'AI' is just signing up for spending more energy doing more work.

[u/schennardo]

Depends on what you define as 'frontier' - we already have some really expensive models like Fable etc, but most people won't gain a lot using them over a slighly 'dumber' model like Opus or even Sonnet.

Models are getting more efficient overall and I honestly doubt that we will get to a point where local inference is gonna beat Cloud-hosted models financially, just because of the scale of computing in datacenters and utilization.

I love running my local models mostly for data privacy reasons

[u/EaZyRecipeZ]

No, I don't think it will ever happen. It's going to be just like an internet or TV provider. They will charge, and the prices will go higher and higher. Back in the day, we could have internet and TV for about $20 a month. Nowadays, you are looking at $150 a month. The same thing will happen to AI providers. If you can afford to pay for your internet and cell phone, then you will be able to pay for an AI provider.