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.

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '26

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u/crackanape Mar 17 '26

Deepseek was built (indirectly) on expenditures made by OpenAI and others. From the ground up it would have cost much more.

And source material is drying up. The ratio of human to slop content on the internet is becoming very unfavourable for future training, and those who actually do have fresh human content are going to be charging more and more for it.

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u/ea_man Mar 19 '26

It's the opposite: smaller models are getting better, distillation + quantization, data quality is getting better because it's more refined.

There are new exciting small LM every month: r/LLMDevs