3 ms·
So intelligence has turned into a utility per Sam Altman et al., and now the same companies get to hike the price of accessing it by 20–30%, right as it’s becom
by rambojohnson 6mo ago
So intelligence has turned into a utility per Sam Altman et al., and now the same companies get to hike the price of accessing it by 20–30%, right as it’s becoming the backbone of how teams actually ship work. People are pushing out so much, so fast that last week’s output is already a blur. I’ve got colleagues who refuse to go back to writing any of this stuff by hand.
And now maintaining that pace means absorbing arbitrary price increases, shrugged off with “we were operating at a loss anyway.”
It stops being “pay to play” and starts looking more like pay just to stay in the ring, while enterprise players barely feel the hit and everyone else gets squeezed out.
Market maturing my butthole... it’s obviously a dependency being priced in real time. Tech is an utter shit show right now, compounded by the disaster of the unemployment market still reeling from the overhiring of 2020.
save up now and career pivot. pick up gardening.
- colechristensen 6mo agoLike every startup ever, they were selling it to you at a loss to compete for market share and are slowly increasing pricing. Duh.
- wslh 6mo agoBut the unique thing about AI is that the "world" is depending on it like water, oil, gas, etc. Not just a specific use case.
- colechristensen 6mo agoSo it should be free? What's your point exactly?
- wslh 6mo agoNo, that's not my point. My point is that AI looks like something fairly unique in today's landscape: a resource that almost everyone is starting to depend on. It's a bit like the Internet, except usage is metered, and paying more can improve the quality of the result for the same underlying task, such as cybersecurity. In this context I also imagine we will have greater and greater local models, and the (dependency) ending game is completely unclear.
- efficax 6mo agoIt's just computation, which the world already depended on. we're in the mainframe era, but "AI" will go personal, and on-device.
- wslh 6mo agoGood analogy, but there's a key difference: mainframes were an institutional dependency, whereas the world's reliance on LLMs is consumer driven, ubiquitous, an uncapped (e.g. spend more on the same "loops"). Completely agree on the second point, though powerful local models are the inevitable next step, and they are arriving fast.
- wslh 6mo ago> So intelligence has turned into a utility. "Utility" is close, but "energy source" may be closer. When it becomes the thing powering the pace of work itself, raising prices is less about charging for access and more about taxing dependency.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]