5 ms·

That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some us

That's rather shitty. It's one thing to disallow bypassing preferential pricing models, it's a completely different thing to castrate your model against some uses. You can see how it goes in the future. Wanna vibe code a throwaway script? $0.20. Ah, it's for a legal document search? $10k then. Oh and we'll charge 20% of your app sales too - I can see how they are going in real time, mind you!

dangus 6mo ago
This is absolutely how it’s going work. AI loses way too much money to not be enshittified. It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag.
- rapind 6mo ago
  No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent.
  - delusional 6mo ago
    When the consolidation phase starts, you bet your ass open weight models are going to stop.
    - mitchitized 6mo ago
      I don't think consolidation will ever happen, the AI space is already dominated by a few whales. Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.
  - dragonwriter 6mo ago
    The firms training those models have costs; without monetization they are even more unsustainable than subsidized commercial models. (Effectively, they are just a heavy form of subsidy ro overcome being commercially behind.)
    - HWR_14 6mo ago
      The CCP wants to lead the world in AI. Market forces don't apply to the Chinese models.
      - judahmeek 6mo ago
        Market forces won't apply to American models either if the American government bans Chinese-created models due to "national security".
- delusional 6mo ago
  I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay? This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.
  - rapind 6mo ago
    Ideally? Competition.
- bugglebeetle 6mo ago
  Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.
  - rapind 6mo ago
    It'll be interesting to see what happens when OpenAI goes public. I'm expecting the executives to run away with bags of money once they offload their insane risk to the public... or maybe there's a bailout / money printer scenario in the works. I guarantee some insider adjacents are going to make a killing in a way that will never be investigated.
    - fragmede 6mo ago
      How would they make money in a way that should be investigated? Favored insider-adjacent folk would have been able to invest in pre-IPO SPVs or whatever that will have outsized returns, assuming the IPO goes well. It's unfair, but above board (accredited investor etc) according to the SEC, so what would they investigate? Unless there's other malfeasance you're alleging.
- dragonwriter 6mo ago
  AI loses money for two reasons: (1) certain uses where owning the market is expected to be a high long-term value are currently heavily subsidized (the top-level story here is about the increasing efforts of model providers to prevent exploits where people convert subsidized services to uses outside the target of the subsidy), and (2) development costs of new models to keep up with competition.
throwaway277432 6mo ago
Unironically yes. I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do. "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too. Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.
- pingou 6mo ago
  This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).
- KronisLV 6mo ago
  > "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
  - RussianCow 6mo ago
    > the moat any single org has is somewhat limited I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
    - KronisLV 6mo ago
      > Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/ https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation. I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).
2ndorderthought 6mo ago
I'm not a lawyer but is this legal? It's extremely anticompetitive.
- bdangubic 6mo ago
  what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no?
  - 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
    They are technically billing people for services not rendered without any disclaimer?
    - duped 6mo ago
      Price discrimination for services is mostly legal
      - in_cahoots 6mo ago
        Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact?
        duped 6mo ago
        Depends. Comcast is able to charge you and a business for the same service at different rates. They have also tried to do exactly what you're talking about, where they bill differently based on the data being accessed (remember net neutrality?). But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not. In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time. Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it.
andai 6mo ago
So like taxes except they actually help you survive?
p_stuart82 6mo ago
Yep. They built the quote engine before they built the pricing page. "OpenClaw" in your git history is enough to kick you off quota and onto metered billing.

dangus 6mo ago

This is absolutely how it’s going work. AI loses way too much money to not be enshittified. It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag.

rapind 6mo ago
No chance unless open weight models out of China discontinue. The gap right now is practically nonexistent.
- delusional 6mo ago
  When the consolidation phase starts, you bet your ass open weight models are going to stop.
  - mitchitized 6mo ago
    I don't think consolidation will ever happen, the AI space is already dominated by a few whales. Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.
- dragonwriter 6mo ago
  The firms training those models have costs; without monetization they are even more unsustainable than subsidized commercial models. (Effectively, they are just a heavy form of subsidy ro overcome being commercially behind.)
  - HWR_14 6mo ago
    The CCP wants to lead the world in AI. Market forces don't apply to the Chinese models.
    - judahmeek 6mo ago
      Market forces won't apply to American models either if the American government bans Chinese-created models due to "national security".
delusional 6mo ago
I mean obviously. Why would the companies that control this technology NOT charge the absolute maximum amount their customers are willing to pay? This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.
- rapind 6mo ago
  Ideally? Competition.
bugglebeetle 6mo ago
Deepseek has demonstrated that there is no reason for it to actually lose money. The awful business practices and monopoly tactics of the frontier model labs in the US are the problem.
- rapind 6mo ago
  It'll be interesting to see what happens when OpenAI goes public. I'm expecting the executives to run away with bags of money once they offload their insane risk to the public... or maybe there's a bailout / money printer scenario in the works. I guarantee some insider adjacents are going to make a killing in a way that will never be investigated.
  - fragmede 6mo ago
    How would they make money in a way that should be investigated? Favored insider-adjacent folk would have been able to invest in pre-IPO SPVs or whatever that will have outsized returns, assuming the IPO goes well. It's unfair, but above board (accredited investor etc) according to the SEC, so what would they investigate? Unless there's other malfeasance you're alleging.
dragonwriter 6mo ago
AI loses money for two reasons: (1) certain uses where owning the market is expected to be a high long-term value are currently heavily subsidized (the top-level story here is about the increasing efforts of model providers to prevent exploits where people convert subsidized services to uses outside the target of the subsidy), and (2) development costs of new models to keep up with competition.

throwaway277432 6mo ago

Unironically yes. I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do. "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too. Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.

pingou 6mo ago
This is assuming there will be no competition. But why wouldn't there be? Especially since you can use open source models, which are not too far from frontier models (from now).
KronisLV 6mo ago
> "It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
- RussianCow 6mo ago
  > the moat any single org has is somewhat limited I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
  - KronisLV 6mo ago
    > Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started. They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/ https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation. I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).

2ndorderthought 6mo ago

I'm not a lawyer but is this legal? It's extremely anticompetitive.

bdangubic 6mo ago
what is illegal about it?! their product, they can do whatever they want and you can choose to be a customer or not, no?
- 2ndorderthought 6mo ago
  They are technically billing people for services not rendered without any disclaimer?
  - duped 6mo ago
    Price discrimination for services is mostly legal
    - in_cahoots 6mo ago
      Imagine if it were Comcast instead of Claude. Comcast gives you 750GB of data a month. Now they decide that visiting HN 'counts' as 750GB and either shut you off or bill you extra. Is that price discrimination or changing the terms after the fact?
      - duped 6mo ago
        Depends. Comcast is able to charge you and a business for the same service at different rates. They have also tried to do exactly what you're talking about, where they bill differently based on the data being accessed (remember net neutrality?). But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not. In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time. Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it.

andai 6mo ago

So like taxes except they actually help you survive?

p_stuart82 6mo ago

Yep. They built the quote engine before they built the pricing page. "OpenClaw" in your git history is enough to kick you off quota and onto metered billing.