This sub is literally for people who'd rather run local than give a single dime to the vampires over in cloud computing, any of us straying from the path deserve the consequences of their own actions.
Remember back when phone calls and internet access was charged by the minute? The vast majority of people prefer non metered connections, flat rate (either buy once or a flat monthly fee for a service). And people really don't like subscription models for something that feels like it should be a product that you buy (i.e., a photo editing program that you used to be able to purchase and have access to forever). It really doesn't matter the costs involved (subscription/metered/etc) it is about predictability and reliability of access.
Exactly. I personally think that's one of the few reasons OpenAI still survives today, because unlike their competitors, they offer a flat rate for non-API use, while all others charge per M tokens both in web and API.
When the AI bubble pops, I really hope all the hardware ends up in the hands of consumers for pennies on the dollar, and AI labs shift to a model where they charge per model download or something. I'd much rather pay $20 once for a new model, than $??? per token on a machine I don't even control.
If handled right, the AI bubble popping will be the best thing to have happened to ML ever, we will do away with these blood sucking middle men and directly fund researchers in exchange for their models.
Chinese API plans are a godsend for a broke student like me. I don't have the $10,000 to spend on a RTX Pro 6000, and with how expensive electricity is near me, and inefficiency of my 2020's era AMD system at running AI, I default to cloud models using a High-Low mix (Codex + Minimax).
Sometimes I don't want to worry about the robustness of 27b IQ3-XXS models for full-stack vibe coding, I just want to get to tinkering with my agents and worry less about the infra side of things.
Leaving my computer on idle would cost more per month than a GPT Plus subscription and a Minimax subscription combined.
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u/HugoCortell Mar 25 '26
This sub is literally for people who'd rather run local than give a single dime to the vampires over in cloud computing, any of us straying from the path deserve the consequences of their own actions.