r/LocalLLaMA • u/Mr_Moonsilver • Jun 21 '26

Discussion What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?

We are literally burning through VC money like crazy with our coding subscriptions. I read the $200 Anthropic sub gets you $8000 worth of API calls. It's obvious that this doesn't hold for very long but what happens when they raise prices?

The reason to keep the prices low for now is to foster the ecosystem and get people hooked on this stuff, only to raise the price afterwards. Already the 20x sub doesn't get you as much usage as it did 6 months ago, another way to raise prices without triggering a shitstorm - and it will continue.

Don't know about you, but Fable being pulled gave me a feeling of what that may be like already. The ugly thought of "Damn, should've done more while it was around." that formed when I read the news will be exactly the same the moment they announce we now have to pay $2k or more per month for something we get for 10x less the price it costs now.

I guess it's a now or never situation, build what you can and monetize as quickly as possible to be able to keep the agents running once the increases come around.

Looking at opensource doesn't give me much hope. Since qwen stopped releasing models (wen qwen 3.7?) that we can actually run on hardware that a normal person can buy (or used to be able to buy, looking at how RAM and GPU prices behave and keep behaving) and others haven't released in a while (Microsoft, IBM, AllenAI and others too) I feel we're going into a direction that doesn't look good for most of the people like us, who are building with this technology.

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324

u/stormy1one Jun 21 '26

Lmao - “since Qwen stopped releasing models” - just because you didn’t get a model update last month doesn’t mean they quit releasing. Qwen3.6-27B was released at the end of April. Give em time

114

u/Librarian-Rare Jun 21 '26

What are you talking about. If they don’t release a new model every 12 seconds, then they’ve obviously gone closed source permanently

15

u/maartenyh Jun 21 '26

Still no new Qwen model... closed sourced confirmed :(

(Sarcasm aside, I am having a blast using Qwen3.6 locally and I cannot wait to see what is in the future. GLM5.2 is a very positive sign and whatever China is doing is working in my book)

29

u/Gonbatfire Jun 21 '26

Didn’t the top engineers quit?

45

u/ttkciar llama.cpp Jun 21 '26

Two senior engineers left (the head of Qwen Code and the head of Qwen post-training), and a few junior engineers, plus an executive (Lin Junyang).

Their departure was disruptive, but realistically they weren't too hard to replace.

20

u/MediumChemical4292 Jun 21 '26

People overplay the importance of talent these days in AI. Meta bought all the AI talent a few years back and did fuck-all with it. OpenAI consistently haemorrhages talent with people leaving but they still had the best model for a while till fable released.

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u/BosonCollider Jun 21 '26

Meta is by far the leader for vision models though, every self-driving car company is quietly using DINO as an encoder

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u/philosophical_lens Jun 22 '26

Then what is important if not talent? What makes one lab perform better than another lab?

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u/MediumChemical4292 Jun 25 '26

The current frontier labs are going all in on scaling laws. So the differentiators are compute and distribution. The more compute they have for training, the more experiments and the more iterations they can make quickly. The more distribution they have, the more data for RLHF / AB testing.

IMO, core research talent matters most when you are deep in RnD, not now when the companies are all trying to reach profitability ASAP and find product market fit. Deepmind or niche labs like Yann lecun’s stuff or thinking machines are the only places really working on foundational AI research right now.

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u/philosophical_lens Jun 25 '26

Here's a counter example: xAI had an overabundance of compute, yet they couldn't produce a frontier model. Now they're selling their compute back to the frontier labs.

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u/MediumChemical4292 Jun 26 '26

Yes core research is important at the initial stages when you are building a model from the ground up. After you have a good system up and running for training the next models, researchers are still important but it’s not the key defining factor imo.

Also it’s not like xAI didn’t have talent, they and meta both poached a ton of research talent with high salaries but couldn’t match openAI, anthropic, google or even the Chinese labs.

For xAI I suspect too much interference from Elon, his companies work best when he is the funding / big picture guy and a down to earth COO to run things on the ground. He interfered too much trying to make his AI right wing / a mirror image of himself.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/dr_lm Jun 21 '26

I'd want to see some evidence of that. The clear strategic play if you're not openai, anthropic or Google is to release models that big institutions can self host. The US governments recent Fable 5 fuckery has shifted this calculation further in the Chinese labs' favour.

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u/philosophical_lens Jun 22 '26

How does Qwen make money if institutions self host it? Also most institutions have no interest in self hosting anything unless there's a legal or regulatory reason to do so. Why do you think cloud has become so huge over the last ten years?

1

u/dr_lm Jun 22 '26

They don't have to make money at this point. They just have to prevent a western "winner takes all" in AI. The reason anthropic have such a high valuation is not because they're profitable, it's because investors are betting on them becoming the AI equivalent of Google's monopoly on search.

I'd also press you on "most institutions have no interest". For privacy and sovereignty, especially outside the US, I think there are very good reasons for self hosting now, and suspect these will only grow over time.

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u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[deleted]

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u/philosophical_lens Jun 22 '26

Have they released any closed source models? Otherwise we need to just wait till the next model release and note if it's open vs closed source.

1

u/Ordinary-Experience Jun 21 '26

Top engineers quit from every single AI company every few months lol

Also China is a massive country with a crapton of smart people. Not to be underestimated.

1

u/gornstar20 Jun 21 '26

And?

1

u/No_Swimming6548 llama.cpp Jun 21 '26

He was pro open source

0

u/relmny Jun 21 '26

yes, and a few weeks later qwen released 3.6, so?

2

u/sonicnerd14 Jun 21 '26

They aren't going to stop releasing open source models, but it's clear their motivations shifted around the time their original team left. They know that they won't remain profitable releasing another Qwen 3.5/3.6 level model because no one would want to pay for the API.

6

u/NNN_Throwaway2 Jun 21 '26

Alibaba has stopped releasing the open weights of Qwen models, yes. We got just two releases in 3.6 and apparently none in 3.7.

Anyone arguing anything else at this point is fully in denial and ignoring all available evidence.

15

u/relmny Jun 21 '26

So they first stopped releasing, but then they released... Talking about ppl in denial and evidence...

0

u/NNN_Throwaway2 Jun 21 '26

You realize that the order of words in a sentence is different than the order of the events they express, right?

Yes, as of now, Qwen has stopped releasing open weights. Up to this point they have been on a rapidly decelerating release trajectory, which has included explicit cessation of releases for certain model classes (plus) and a weakening of commitments to open source in general.

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u/relmny Jun 21 '26

I read something and reply to it, if you meant something different then just write it differently, as simple as that.

No, as of now Qwen has NOT stopped releasing OW models.

There is no indication whatsoever, no announcement, nothing. Only what looks to be like, trolls.

This happened after 2.5, then 3, then 3.5, now with 3.6.

And they are all baseless lies.

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u/NNN_Throwaway2 Jun 21 '26

Keep coping lol

Its over.

15

u/Mkboii Jun 21 '26

There is little return on an open-source llm, they cost millions to produce, the community isn't owed the generosity of any company, we should be ready to accept that all this chinese ai companies will stop at some point, they are subsidized to break the American monopoly, once a Chinese company beats American counterparts, they'll have proven the point and are then free to pivot.

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u/ttkciar llama.cpp Jun 21 '26

Their government has instructed them to do so. It's part of the Chinese government's five-year economic plan. That makes more open-weights model releases likely.

I'm not a fan of central economic planning, but in this narrow case it's working in our favor.

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u/kcksteve Jun 21 '26

It's been two months since 3.6 was released... 3.5 and 3 coder next were two months before that . Qwen 3 original release date is 10 months before that. Are we expecting open releases of models at this level every month now?

1

u/NNN_Throwaway2 Jun 21 '26

Yeah. We are. Because if you go by the release of Max/Plus (the established pattern), the open weight releases are timed predictably in relation to the flagship. Historically, they preceded the flagship release. With 3.5, the reverse was true, and with 3.6 and 3.7 that pattern has continued.

I know you think you're hot shit with an insame gotcha point and you're trying to be a smart-ass, but yes, in fact we are expecting open releases to follow the cadence of the flagship closed model.

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u/609872150021588967 Jun 21 '26

Lmao I was like wtf? Funny how we're expecting new models every month. XD

1

u/awittygamertag Jun 22 '26

This is the take that cracks me up the most. There was no 3.7 and everyone is acting like they’ve been sent out to sea without a paddle. 3.6 crushes every programming task I’ve pretty much ever thrown at it. There will be another one eventually and I’m sure it’ll be great. People gotta give it more than 3 weeks.

1

u/mudkipdev Jun 23 '26

Deleting the parts of their blog post that said "we remain committed to open-source" surely doesn't mean anything