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These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.
by PessimalDecimal 4mo ago
These are still at currently subsidized prices. We'll see if they think they're getting $1500/month of value when that buys significantly fewer tokens.
- boringg 4mo agoTrue but they will raise prices slowly so people will optimize their workflow so they aren't just throwing as much inference as fast as possible like the current state. Right now you should do everything you wanted to try out because it is cheap (as long as you don't become dependent ... the risk).
- pdyc 4mo agoafaik, enterprise plans are not subsidized. its 20$/seat+api pricing. Unless you are saying api pricing itself is subsidized.
- LurkandComment 4mo agoThis is market introductory pricing that hasn't factored in cost recovery. Most of it has been run on early investment with the assumption they will recover costs in the long run. The prices are subsidized across the board and they will need to go up signficantly to recover them.
- logancbrown 4mo agoNone of what you said is true
- rimliu 4mo agoAnd you know this how?
- logancbrown 3mo agoBurden of proof is on you
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAssuming this were accurate, then presumably the AI companies would be betting that inference costs come down before the bill is due - I don't see enterprises being willing to absorb another ~10x price increase for tokens (as they've just done going from subscription prices to per-token pricing)
- LurkandComment 4mo agoFor claude shops this was a huge hit. But lets back this up. There are some companies that haven't even built a break-even model at this price because they are funded by investment. As soon as those investors lose patience the first dominos will fall. For those who have somewhat of a business model, will it survive a price increase? The bigger question is do the base model providers have enough runway and have a way to keep going as they need to recover costs.
- pqtyw 4mo agoIt's mostly R&D though, not inference. If LLM's effectively become a commodity then they are screwed anyway.
- swiftcoder 4mo agoAren’t the Chinese labs quickly turning them into a commodity? The open-weight models will have a steady race to the bottom on inference costs just by dint of competition between providers. They aren’t at the frontier yet, but they are rapidly eating the flash market.
- pqtyw 4mo agoYeah, that's not going to work if you can get e.g. 80% of value by using 10-20x or more cheaper open models. At some point it would just make sense for large companies to rent compute and deploy their version of DeepSeek or whatever (if they don't trust Chinese providers)
- square_usual 4mo agoThere is no evidence that per-token inference prices (which is what Uber is setting a cap on) is subsidized.
- lelanthran 4mo agoIs there any evidence that it's not?
- thejazzman 4mo agoYes; they ban various uses of their subscriptions but say you can do whatever if you’re paying for the API without limits
- lelanthran 4mo agoThat's not evidence. Very likely though, but the only evidence we get one way or another is when they IPO.
- simonw 4mo agoThis story isn't about those subscriptions - enterprise customers like Uber are paying the full API prices.
- pqtyw 4mo agoThat's just market segmentation and them trying to maximize revenue it doesen't really say anything about their costs.
- Topfi 4mo agoThe fact that Anthropic models are offered at the same API pricing by not just themselves but AWS, Azure and Vertex despite Anthropic taking a major slice on licensing along with the cost an open weight 1T parameter model like K2.6 costs to run on any third-party provider, make it unlikely that API inference cost are subsidized by the labs.
- pqtyw 4mo agoOpenrouter? i.e. Even excluding Deep Seek inference for very large open models is way cheaper. Maybe these providers are not very profitable but its highly unlikely that they are losing $4 for every $1 they make since selling inference is their only product...
- sourcecodeplz 4mo agoI understand current Codex $20 sub is worth about $480 GPT5 api credits.
- esafak 4mo agoWay more. Track with https://github.com/junhoyeo/tokscale https://github.com/junhoyeo/tokscale
- MagicMoonlight 4mo agoIt's not. They recently forced enterprise customers onto API billing instead of the cheap consumer pricing. Now the pricing is brutal.
- pqtyw 4mo agoThe inference prices for very large open models would indicate that Antrophic's and OpenAI's margins are quite large.