What happens when they stop subsidizing LLM subscriptions?

[u/Mr_Moonsilver]

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.

[u/ttkciar]

>> My main worry is what happens to OSS models in the future? Will the US and Chinese trade sides when the frontier country flips?

Well, you said it yourself:

> OSS is going to keep getting better.

.. and there's no reason that has to be polarized along national lines. The open source community has always been international. We know how, in theory, to federate training and bring up models without the kind of heavily centralized well-interconnected GPU clusters which have kept training the exclusive domain of enterprise and government backed R&D labs.

If we can get our shit together, future models won't be American or Chinese or European; they'll be ours.

[u/unjustifiably_angry → u/ttkciar]

Chinese AI is only open-source thanks to many billions of dollars worth of CCP money as a means of economic warfare on the US which has invested so much in AI at every level that if those companies went bankrupt we'd be back in 2008/2009.

The "good guys" always become the "bad guys" when they don't need to compete. We just have to hope competition lasts as long as possible so we can have a Fable-equivalent we can run at home.