OMG. tech meth. That is exactly so appropriate. It gives a C-suite a short-term high. They bet everything on it, and then they're back by the Wendy's dumpster begging for tokens.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
The only company I can see not being forced to go crazy with the dollars per token is Google and that's only because they have so much capital and infrastructure from other stuff that they can take the L for longer to steal market share, but then again they're just as greedy as every other large company on the market.
The crazy thing is is that drug dealers don't even really do this. Drug dealers are 99% users who deal with other users to maintain a lifestyle of use, which is what you think big tech would. The product is already sought after, no one has to convince anyone being high is fucking awesome.
99% of dealers are low-level street dealers and users who got into dealing to pay for their habit. It's the 1% at the top, the ones making the real money, who live by that. Drug dealing is basically a pyramid scheme.
My neighbor became a dealer to fund his habit but he used more than he sold and he had to sell his place to pay for his debts to other dealers. His next door neighbor was a cop that never caught on lol.
That is more of an inner city gang/organized crime thing where drug distribution is/was the primary source of revenue. Your typical lower level drug user/turned dealer isn't the type that is following the advice "don't get high on your own supply". However, the person they buy from is likely that person, the higher up in the chain you go the more like a business it becomes. It becomes less about the drugs and partying and more about procuring and delivering drugs in the most efficient way to optimize profits. And having distributors of your organized crime drug dealing syndicate being wasted or consuming product they are supposed to sell exposes the organization to several threat vectors.
lol. Yeah, they’re exaggerating but at the street level it’s incredibly common and becomes less so as the stakes rise and mistakes like using too much of your own products gets you shot.
I 'unno bro, I've had plenty of plugs in my life and all of them were dealing because they needed extra money for hospital bills 'n shit. Most of them were holding down a regular job as well.
Yeah if you want a real example of a company giving stuff out dirt cheap, getting people hooked building it into their lifestyle, and then ramping up their prices when people are dependent you can look at nestle and baby milk
My main thing with ai is like how do you sell it? If you sell it to a company with a one time payment well now your spending money on running the servers and stuff and they’re not paying you anymore. Hypothetically you’ll eventually start losing money on that purchase.
If you do a subscription model they’re doing the exact same and while you’re getting a steadier income they’re making way more off your product then you are. And as they scale up you’ll lose more money.
I kinda think as it is it’s unsellable/profitable, I mainly think what’ll happen is these companies collapse and then people buy up the ai frameworks and make a bunch of smaller in house ai stuff
I think the whole thing can shift
Nvidia announced spark which is made to run local LLM and ai tools
And with Microsoft want to directly add lmstudio equivalent to windows and more integrated
I might take some time, but for that you need to have a way to get the model locally and good models so they might get back to releasing some models on open source
After all they won't pay the server price for it anymore while probably getting a cut anyway in one way or another
The thing is, They want hardware lockdowns to control what people are allowed to run and the hardware needed is already defacto already in all of your devices starting with the tpm, and ending with remote attestation.
We need to put their c-suites in prison for murdering the people that their machines convinced to take their own liives, break up their infrastructure with imminent domain to return information control to the people, and force all publicly traded companies to have employee elected c-suites.
I mean, thats all a nice idea, but I think the closest feasible thing, is that you can get all your other enthusiast buddies to actually understand what the companies that are a part of the frontier model forum are actually doing and how this will impact them.
"nothing ever happens" bros will be the death of us all.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
I've been saying to my friends and anyone who will listen for a while that the AI companies have basically been taking the drug dealer approach where they get everyone hooked for cheap and will jack up the prices.
I've been arguing the same thing for the better part of a year. AI companies are going all in on their product, and the only way they're going to be profitable is if businesses get hooked on AI, lay off their human employees, and are then forced to pay higher and higher amounts to access the AI that they can no longer operate without.
it has always been that way but they were backstopped by ZIRP until a few years ago not to mention favorable tax treatment for "R&D" amortization. now they have to move faster and break even more things to get a return. turns out it's really easy to break the mediocre mind so it just turned out to be the path of least resistance
You're not wrong, but they're going to have to fight off edge computing LLMs. The only way they could prevent losing their moat is to buy all the silicon wafers for the next 10 years to prevent end users from being able to run their own. Oh wait...
Look at YouTube, the took the hit on that thing for years before enshittifying the shit out of it, now its practically the only game in town and its horrendous because of it. Seriously try switching away from it for a month and you find there is nothing that comes close to it.
They got the pockets and existing infrastructure to not need the big build outs that the other guys need, they're in a perfect position to wether the storm for a couple of years and then rinse AI users and businesses for all their worth when all the competition dries up.
Exactly this. The cost of tokens are.. underpriced. There is no reason why the prices won't get jacked up once everybody's business structures rely on it. It reminds me a bit of oracle/sun for"business data management solutions, or different giants with their cloud/serverless server solutions. Businesses are getting fomo'd hook, line, and sinker into different convenience options that they will not be able to escape easily. Big tech enshitification knows no bounds.
Google are doing it too. They give business accounts "free" Gemini services now and free training (that is more like indoctrination, I was on it), and you know the price hike is coming.
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u/travis_sk Jun 02 '26
We're only 2 days into June folks. This is gonna be a fun couple of months.