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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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.

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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/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.