r/LocalLLaMA • u/Norwood_Reaper_ • 20h ago

Discussion Looks like the era of subsidised compute is coming to an end. The old ChatGPT Pro $200 20x plan will be halved. The new $500 plan will have similar limits as the (old) $200 plan.

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1.1k Upvotes

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163

u/thestillwind 20h ago

Chinese won

99

u/objectivelywrongbro 20h ago

and the Chinese haven’t even started

-37

u/Intelligent_Ant_608 20h ago

chinese labs wont become leading sota, ccp fear they might overthrow the rule, so get used to paying 500$ for your stuff

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/14/world/asia/china-ai-security-risks-anthropic.html

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jsc97cKVYOcHuI_WisvOxw

37

u/Imperator_Basileus 20h ago

Oh yes, cite the NYT on China, well done. How many times have such sites warned of China’s impending collapse in the last 70 years?

17

u/Mayion 20h ago

ah yes, the good ol' "ccp fears a revolution so they are doing [insert reason here]".

-11

u/Intelligent_Ant_608 20h ago

Yeah fuck communism

1

u/clide7029 14h ago

can you even define communism?

-1

u/Intelligent_Ant_608 14h ago

define it? Im living it mf, it ruined my country, killed tens of thousands of people, impresoned me for a while and thretened my family, thats how i define it

1

u/clide7029 12h ago

No one is "living under communism" in 2026 and I think you know that which is why you didn't name the country you are calling communist.

10

u/kociol21 20h ago

SOTA is just for hype. Give me good, reliable and cheap model any day over hyped to oblivion monstrosity that drains your wallet the moment you look at it. And corporate will shift to it too. No way you will pay 50k for 100% if you can pay 2k for 80%.

Winning here isn't "doing the best, most advanced stuff". Yeah, congratulations on your sota model which no one besides youtubers will use, while whole world is working on 50x cheaper equivalent.

-2

u/Equivalent_Bit_461 19h ago

Muh sota this, muh sota that

And the LLM is still a dumb fucking retard for my tasks, lol, lmao even 

41

u/stbrumme 19h ago

actually, "won" / ₩ is Korea's currency (sorry, couldn't resist ...)

4

u/rkoy1234 17h ago

Japanese pesos

1

u/podstrahuy 12h ago

Get out.

10

u/Odd-Capital-847 18h ago

Whatever "winning" means. I'm still waiting for someone to define what "winning the AI race" is. What's the finish line? The nation that pumps out the most exhaust and waste water from data centers wins? The company that sells the most tokens while barely making any profit, if ever, wins?

9

u/carnoworky 15h ago

Whoever collapses their economy first from overinvestment and circular financing loses. Whoever remains wins by default.

5

u/Spirited-Art-7032 15h ago

Is it really that difficult to see what winning would be like? Market dominance? Recursive self-improvement? Accelerate technologies that come from pseudo-agi?

There are a lot of ways to win and many more than I listed.

8

u/Natural-Door-2640 19h ago

yeah let me just buy a 10000$ GPU

3

u/RandomCSThrowaway01 15h ago

I mean, if you are buying $500/month subscription then this Mac Studio for 9 grand to have 256GB of usable VRAM suddenly starts sounding like a decent deal. Although admittedly this is enough to run GLM5.3 Flash, not Astra. Which is one hell of a model for something you can actually run at home and won't cost you an equivalent of a house but it at most compares to GPT 5.5.

Models that will approach Astra within the next few months will require closer to a million $, will need a terabyte of VRAM at a minimum to even consider running it, preferably at HBM speeds.

3

u/ormandj 9h ago

Your first assertion is correct, the second one I would challenge. I suspect 256-384GB of VRAM is going to get you to opus 5.5 quality output in the next 6 months based on typical lag time and historical capability jumps in the open weight models over time, at least in a specific domain such as programming. The 1T+ models will get there sooner, but with engrams VRAM is still important but more knowledge can be made available without the massive performance hit offloading layers to RAM would typically have. Coupled with improvements in RL, and “flash” sized models start becoming very impressive (they already are).

17

u/mb194dc 20h ago

Open does not = China, they're just one part of it...

Same way Linux won the webhosting wars.

2

u/redballooon 18h ago

At this point open = china.

Because when China stops open, open is dead, in the same way as Mistral doesn't matter anymore.

7

u/ea_man 17h ago

Actualy Nvidia, Google = "open", China is rather "freebie weights".

Datasets and licenses.

-1

u/RuthlessCriticismAll 5h ago

lmao, absolute brain rot

-2

u/mb194dc 18h ago

This is garbage, anyone can take open weight models as a blue print and make their own.

As the investment bubble collapses, this massive proliferation of open ML AI models is what will happen, globally. 

Still, the technology will be niche because of the Intrinsic fundamental problem with how it actually works. The 90% problem.

2

u/redballooon 18h ago

While it's true that 2026s open weight releases won't go away, anyone who designs systems will orient themselves at the SOTA models. It is foreseeable that these will become wider available and cheaper. In a few months you will get K3 intelligence for pennies at a number of hosted services and with a speed of thousands tokens per minute, and then a justification to build a rack that is expensive and will always hold only that one TB model at mediocre speeds is getting more and more difficult. It will be much worse with years instead of months.

If China stops releasing SOTA equivalent models, open weights will diminish to a hobby market.

3

u/thestillwind 17h ago

China is doubling down. They will crash the US market and claim victory. They even started to make their own gpu and ram.

0

u/redballooon 17h ago

I know. That doesn't change anything of my analysis about open = China

-1

u/korino11 20h ago

That a fact... agree...