4 ms·

But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI. I use AI every day at work, but I only pay $20. That's the most I will ever want to pay. And, so

• surgical_fire 2mo ago
  Rofl, I already went for cheaper Chinese solutions. I can achieve more than I could when I was giving OpenAI 20 bucks a month, and for a fraction of the price. I have no idea why people still use ChatGPT or Claude.
  • coliveira 2mo ago
    Most people don't understand how cheap models like DeepSeek and similar are. I have $5 in an account that I use for months. I can get very complex code for less than 50 cents.
  • Kuyawa 2mo ago
    Me too. Sinophobia may be the culprit, too many years watching fox or cnn is my guess? I love chinese phones, cars, cities, people, and now AI models. There is a beautiful world out there to admire if people is willing to open their eyes.
• johnbarron 2mo ago
  You can now, as of this week, run locally models with the same performance of a SOTA model of March this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49229621 The FAFO day of Anthropic and OpenAI arrived.
  • Aurornis 2mo ago
    You will spend thousands of dollars on hardware to run those at lower quality (quantized) than the benchmarks where they match March SOTA performance. Source: I have the hardware to run those locally. I would never recommend it to anyone trying to save money. It’s so much cheaper to pay even Anthropic or OpenAI.
  • IncreasePosts 2mo ago
    Not many people have $10k of specific hardware lying around
• phyalow 2mo ago
  I spent $18k in credits last month, I have 3x 20x Anthropic accounts (for Fable to bypass limits) which runs me another $600ish p/m and then a chatgpt pro account another $200 p/m. The value I got out of it is easily 1-200x what I paid.
  • CrosswordPuzzle 2mo ago
    What are you using it for? I have to assume some kind of agentic workload. Also curious to know when (if ever) you would pivot to Chinese providers to save $$$
  • intended 2mo ago
    Examples like this come up as sub comments very often, but they don’t address the point. Most people will not go beyond $20, forget a 18k.
    • zippyman55 2mo ago
      I use AI daily and pay zero dollars. I get my work done and I stay sharp. A huge mass will always choose the cheapest option.
      • intended 2mo ago
        Absolutely! The opposite end of the preference scale from someone willing to spend 18k a month.
    • etempleton 2mo ago
      Most people won’t go beyond free. A lot of people will spend $20 and some will go above $50.
  • treis 2mo ago
    You make ~2 million dollars a month?
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
• porridgeraisin 2mo ago
  > Even adding something like $20 - $100 subscriptions to every user is a serious enough financial obligation that it needs to go through budget planning / boards I doubt that. In my tiny town in India, office workers use the 1800 INR (20$) plans. 1800 INR/month is like... 4% of the salary these guys get. And since this is mostly MS-office and windows explorer and chrome based stuff in very small, non-tech companies, it pays for itself in literally a day. If they _could_ pay less they would. After all they pirate MS office. But the cheap chinese plans dont have any distribution, whereas OpenAI seems to have effectively marketed to them via IPL ads and such. No one there even knows about deepseek. It also doesn't help deepseek and such are focused on the coding market. No multimodal, office plugins, etc. For personal stuff, people there use Meta AI - mostly because it is directly available in whatsapp and these days they are pushing it by adding a dedicated button for it right on the home page. Regardless, they still call it "chatgpt". OpenAI brand is unmatched.
  • rdedev 2mo ago
    Remember that 20$ is a subsidized rate openai is currently willing to provide. Once that goes down you think these guys would be willing to pay token based billing charges ?
    • porridgeraisin 2mo ago
      It is not going to go away. Rather they have doubled down and opened 399 INR/mo (4$/mo) plans that as of late have GPT 5.6 Luna. The reason this works is that you get lesser inference time compute used for queries on these cheaper plans which makes it sustainable and this is enough for the tasks these guys do. And some local telcos are bundling this subscription as well, so most people just get it for "free". For example, I get Google AI Pro for free with my 350 INR/mo telco plan.
      • rdedev 2mo ago
        These companies have spent billions of investor dollars and they will need to recoup that cost soon. And then show year over year growth on top of that. Unless they can massively scale down training and inference cost or implement AGI I don't know what their plan is. Just provide a subsidized plan for the next 10 or 20 years? Their costs are directly proportional to the amount of tokens the LLM produces. How is a monthly subscription plan supposed to account for such costs?
• rdedev 2mo ago
  [dead]
• r0b05 2mo ago
  Won't the Chinese providers have to raise their prices as well due to the economics of serving inference at scale?
  • spwa4 2mo ago
    Buy an M5 max for $4k and you have a portable Deepseek 0731 for life.
    • dexterdog 2mo ago
      But it won't last for life. It will probably last about 4 years so that equates to about 100/mo.
      • spwa4 2mo ago
        M1 is finishing it's 6th year of life and going strong ...
        • dexterdog 2mo ago
          Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads? Do you have any idea how much electricity it uses over it those 4 years?
          • pulse7 2mo ago
            You cannot wear out an SSD through AI inference alone. LLM weights are only read from the SSD, and read operations do not contribute to SSD wear. SSD wear is primarily caused by write and erase operations.
          • kadoban 2mo ago
            > Have you been trashing the non-replaceabe SSD with constant AI workloads? Your other point is valid, but you're either vastly underestimating how many reads/writes a modern SSD can take or vastly overestimating how much output a typical LLM is capable of.
• alvdef 2mo ago
  anthropic and openai are a part of the ai economy, but not the only. the most valuable company in the world is nvidia, a massive player that benefits from the existance of the ow models. what im trying to say is that we focus a bit too much on the labs, but the biggest part is in the infra that makes everything possible.
• jrflo 2mo ago
  But AI use translates directly to time savings (if it works). You only need 1-2 hours of time savings per employee per week to break even on a $100/seat/month subscription.
  • gedy 2mo ago
    That's not how people mentally price things though, i.e. "streaming is so much cheaper than the movie theaters!", etc
    • memonkey 2mo ago
      How do people mentally price things. I'm on the fringe but I'm willing to pay $60 for a AAA 60 hour game that I'm positive I won't finish but am find if I get 6-10 hours out of it.
  • oblio 2mo ago
    In the US. With how much they've invested in AI they need the entire planet to pay, and pay lots. What's the capex expenditure of Magnificent 7 just this year? Close to $1tn?
    • WarmWash 2mo ago
      They need it to be roughly as popular as first world cell phone usage for a 5-7yr ROI.
      • oblio 2mo ago
        1. Cell phone usage was never free. 2. Cell phone usage was always localized. You had local telcoms and that was about it. Deutsche Telekom Germany didn't have to compete all the time with NTT Docomo Japan. And there are probably 20 other economic differences I'm missing.
      • saghm 2mo ago
        Everyone uses cell phones. Not everyone has a job where paying this much for these tools would be worthwhile for their employer.
• cm2187 2mo ago
  The video quotes sales of $2.5 trillion a year to payoff those investments. What workforce you divide it by is a bit up in the air, but let's use 500 millions, which is basically 100% of the workforce of US + Europe + some change. That gives you around $500 a month per employee (from hedge fund manager to flipping burgers at McDonald's). And there will be competition. I see zero moat right now. The user specific part of the state of the model sits outside of the control of the model (it is basically my code base, or my prompts, all of which I can transfer to any competitor).
  • amluto 2mo ago
    Speaking of user experience: OpenAI has some pretty cool tools, some of which even have decent UX. But I’m amazed that anyone can get real work done with the first party web UI. It is UNBELIEVABLY LAGGY. It makes GitHub seem snappy. It scrolls to a black screen and slowly populates later. It takes tens of seconds to load conversations. On the rare occasions that I’ve tried the fun “ask Pro mode a math question” I think I’ve spent 15 minutes waiting for content to populate in the UI. Oh, and all the obvious features like forking a chat either don’t exist or are somehow hidden. This is on a top-of-the-line client machine. Maybe other users are doing something differently or are being served a different front end JavaScript blob?
    • jurgenburgen 2mo ago
      The iOS app is hot garbage as well. The list of old chats will have topics randomly jumping around which makes it really annoying to try to choose the scheduled task that notified you.
• braebo 2mo ago
  I pay the 200 max for Fable daily driving and it’s worth every penny
• fuzzfactor 2mo ago
  >I'm sure there will be some losers, This is the way it is on Wall Street more each century, and for AI to go public on that exchange it's going to have to go big or go home. Considering the amount of money that has already been spent privately. There is no alternative pipeline to replenish those reserves, and different people have different ideas about capacity and bottlenecks relative to ambitions and what they are supposed to get for their money. As has been mentioned in another comment, there is no alternative foundation other than optimism either. The exchange wouln't exist if it weren't originally intended to trade only shares that were all worth holding otherwise. Naturally some worth holding more than others. This is so big it will be necessary to be able to fool way more people with way more money than usual, otherwise those that prevail will have nowhere near their wildest dreams come true. Naturally AI is never going to fly off the shelf like it could until it starts getting cheaper all the time for huge jumps in performance. Cheap home computers will need to be able to do quite a bit more than they can only do today while connected to a massive AI data center, without ever having been connected to anything outside the home at all. Otherwise AI can not ever be considered "general" any more than computing could be considered personal, until you were no longer reliant on a remote mainframe in a huge out-of-state data center somewhere tied by a thread leading through a squeaky modem over monopolized communication lines. This differential between clunky (clanky?) old data centers' overall computing power relative to the amount held freely within homes & businesses is something that looks like it could be regaining exploitability like never in decades. I know one day Woz jumped right in without needing to be a greedy businessman because there was no possible downside, and he could let just about any dedicated growth leader make as much money as they wanted off his technology. Plus Jobs was no slouch in many ways and Woz never needed to worry with a product that sells itself to begin with, putting Jobs in hog heaven where he could persuasively bring it to the next level almost whenever he wanted like you can do few other ways. So not just dot-com related hardware & software. That goes for memory and storage too, people should do the math on how affordable nominal amounts are supposed to be by now. If everything were still normal 16GB of DDR4 would be about $10, at least by 2027, so it hasn't merely doubled in the last year which is the most obvious part, it has skyrocketed to 10x what it would have been. And still rising not falling, so all this is going to have to be reversed for consumers to even afford what they used to be able to do. For people who didn't want to spend a thing on AI until it's naturally way more capable and constantly getting cheaper like it should be, it's pretty frustrating when it's already been unavoidably costing "indirectly" more than they have been willing to pay if they were getting maximum benefit, when most of them have only gotten more surveillance. One day "indirectly" was just no longer true through no fault of millions of people. And growing as fast as the money stream will allow. Up until recently AI was way more niche and fewer ordinary consumers were exposed, where now there are millions more aware of its influence and growing fast. But the more aware more ordinary people become, millions more opinions are going to come to the surface and need to be dealt with. >whale economy. Thar she blows! One pervasive opinion is that so far it's made by rich people for rich people, and more so than most those who want to get rich quick are joining the bandwagon. Of course what consumers see in the media is only the "band directors" who are already rich to begin with, they set the example because they now want to get richer quicker and this is the vehicle they have chosen to do that. This is not unexpected, after all they always get what they want when it's things you have to be ungodly rich to do. This makes for company valuations based more on optimism than anything else and once that has eclipsed underlying worth then any unforeseen bottlenecks or financing stumbles become highly magnified. For one thing there may not be enough momentum to even fully build enough data centers to fulfill some players' plans for recouping such large investments, but at the same time AI's not going to really get good until data centers are not needed at all, which is so ominous there appears to be even more force being applied to encourage people to ignore things like this. Otherwise it could get too shocking. This disparity in upside just plain instinctively sidelines more ordinary people as it builds, so the number of people who are just going to have to wait for AI and everything associated with it to start getting cheaper all the time becomes a force in itself. It'll be easy to notice without being a finance guru. Until then gamble at your own risk :\
• stackbutterflow 2mo ago
  To put it into perspective if we consider that US salaries are 3 to 5 times those of other "rich" countries then it's already a 60 to 100 dollar subscription for the next richest part of the world.
  • fallingbananna 2mo ago
    I have a devils advocate argument: AI spend doesn't need to scale with salary. If a company was OK with paying 10k a month for an employee in the US because they considered their work more valuable. And the same company is only willing to spend 300 per month on someone in a 3rd world country, because they consider the work to be lower quality. Wouldn't it be reasonable to consider a situation where the same company would be willing to only spend 100 per month more on the 10k employee to make them a bit faster. At the same time be willing to spend 700 per month on the 300 employee, if it levels out their capabilities and makes them nearly as valuable as the 10k employee? -- This argument is riddled with assumptions, but I do feel like it's one possible direction that some companies might try to take.
• carlosjobim 2mo ago
  > But the question is how much are people willing to pay for AI. That depends on how much more money they can make with AI or save with AI. It shouldn't be very hard to know that number in a well run business. Even for a one man business.
• surajrmal 2mo ago
  If they can get productivity increases equivalent to .1% it pays for itself. That's roughly equivalent to firing 1 in 1000 employees to finance the software.
• red-iron-pine 2mo ago
  bingo. it helped me sort through 2 CSVs earlier today. grunt work, really, and nothing some python skills or excel-fu couldn't solve just as quickly. it also got something wrong, and I had to put it into a different AI to understand why. not really to bad though, a 2 minute, sanity check. I'd pay no more than, say $3 for the use, maybe 5. If they want to start clocking us $200 a day, or $4000 a license or whatever -- nah.