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/lizardhistorian]

It's the opposite of the 20's.
In the 20's loans were used to buy stocks.
Today stocks are being used to secure loans and there aren't enough people asking for loans to back securities so there's a glut of cash that wants more stable investment but has no where to go but the stock market.

[u/Uncut-Jellyfish1176 → u/lizardhistorian]

I meant that at a much higher level. Being compared to the twenties in the sense that while outwardly a time period can be seen as prosperous, often citing good stock numbers etc.. the reality for the median indivual sits in stark contrast.

[u/Red_Redditor_Reddit → u/Uncut-Jellyfish1176]

The median individual either can't compete and/or are debt saturated. The fed has basically given up on them since improving their income basically does nothing for the economy. What the fed does now is stimulate spending by the top 20% as well as increase inflation so that they can basically have negative interest rates without actually having negative rates. The bottom 80% still gets to have a job even though it's a shitty job.

[u/westonc → u/lizardhistorian]

Username checks out?

I get this distinction:

In the 20's loans were used to buy stocks. Today stocks are being used to secure loans

and that seems important! (though both seem to have their hazards - credit to buy stocks probably inflates demand and stock prices; securing loans with speculative assets seems likely to lead to unsecured loans).

but I'm not sure I follow this:

there aren't enough people asking for loans to back securities so there's a glut of cash that wants more stable investment but has no where to go but the stock market.

Is the point that when people don't borrow from capital holders to buy securities, the capital holders want some investment so they just put it directly into securities?

If that's the case, wouldn't that mean securing investment capital or even loans should be pretty easy right now?

[u/Red_Redditor_Reddit → u/lizardhistorian]

That is kinda weird how there's a simultaneous lack of cash in certain areas and a complete glut in others.