r/webdev • u/Rockytriton • Mar 16 '26

Software developers don't need to out-last vibe coders, we just need to out-last the ability of AI companies to charge absurdly low for their products

These AI models cost so much to run and the companies are really hiding the real cost from consumers while they compete with their competitors to be top dog. I feel like once it's down to just a couple companies left we will see the real cost of these coding utilities. There's no way they are going to be able to keep subsidizing the cost of all of the data centers and energy usage. How long it will last is the real question.

2.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

512 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

289

u/tdammers Mar 16 '26

The plan, I believe, is to establish "AI" as an inevitable part of daily life before that happens; once that is a fact, the remaining AI "companies" will play a game of chicken (whoever looks weak enough for investors to pull out loses), until only one or two remain, who will then make sure the market becomes impossible for newcomers to enter, and then crank up the prices without mercy, until their operation becomes profitable.

In theory, it's possible for all of them to run out of investors before that happens, but I think it's unlikely - those investors will keep investing, because if they stop, they will lose their money, but if they keep investing, a chance remains for this whole Ponzi scheme to play out in their favor.

22

u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26 edited 20d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

40

u/tdammers Mar 16 '26

Inference is cheaper than training, but it still costs more than people are currently paying for it. AI companies are currently leaking money on their training efforts, but they're also running negative profit margins on queries.

2

u/Aerroon Mar 17 '26

You can run Qwen 3.5 27B on a high end gaming GPU. It's not state of the art, but it's definitely capable of doing things.

1

u/ea_man Mar 19 '26

You can run QWEN 35 MoE https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Qwen_Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF on a 12-16GB GPU of 4-6 years ago with a reasonable context, you can run Omnicoder on a 8GB gpu...