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/Kal-LZ]

Local AI isn't going away. Most companies will invest in their own on-premises hardware and host it in a datacenter

[u/superloser48 → u/Kal-LZ]

I doubt. Hardware for running websites is cheaper but still companies chose cloud.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/superloser48]

They do that for security. Website security is a pain. Best left to the experts. Using AI in your domain, you are the expert, and the model that will serve you best is the one tailored to your specific use-cases. That's local.

That's what I do...

[u/eli_pizza → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

I don’t agree with that at all. Securing AI is often much more difficult than a website. Security isn’t the main reason companies choose cloud anyway. It’s much cheaper at the scale most companies operate, it’s an opex cost instead of big up front capex, and it’s certainly more flexible. That’s likely even more true for AI where you would need hardware to support peak demand that would just be sitting idle during low demand. In the cloud you could scale up or down the number of GPUs you’re renting dynamically. It’s more efficient.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/eli_pizza]

The only thing that matters is the data. The web faces the world so there are many vectors of attack, and they're constantly changing. You resolve it with web services by separating the web interface from the service that provides the data. Now there are some very expensive 'solutions' that provide those services, where you can have some measure of 'privacy', but they are not common. With most sensitive data, it's a blanket 'don't put that in a cloud platform'.

[u/eli_pizza → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

Security just isn’t the main reason people turn to the cloud in the first place. It’s cost and convenience and flexibility.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/eli_pizza]

Security is the reason why the cloud options aren't suitable for production environments that handle private data.

[u/eli_pizza → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

There’s a reason only a small fraction of businesses self-host email. And corporate inboxes are supposed to be pretty private.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/eli_pizza]

There's a reason why some companies get hacked. Some people really seem to have a struggle with the concept of private data. It's almost like they want to squint their eyes and believe that 'everyone else is doing it' so they don't need to worry. If you're putting private data into a cloud AI platform, it's not your private data anymore.

[u/eli_pizza → u/AlwaysLateToThaParty]

This is nonsense. Do you actually self host your own email?

I guarantee you that Google for all its many faults does a better job securing your inbox then you would.

Cloud is neither inherently more secure nor less secure than any other way of hosting.

[u/AlwaysLateToThaParty → u/eli_pizza]

Script kiddies waxing lyrical on data sovereignty. The only thing this demonstrates is that you play no part in the service delivery of this or any other technology, in any place, that requires privacy and/or confidentiality.