So basically we'll end up with a version of the amish that are stuck in the early 2000s instead of the 1800s.

The people selling shovels are the ones building data centers and energy. Tokens are the "gold".

Plan to keep it forever free :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376931

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This sounds pretty unlikely. It's more likely that there's an issue with your surround system, and that audio "should" be coming from your rear speakers but for some reason it's not.

> On an economic basis, a monthly subscription only makes sense with relatively static costs.

Running a data center is a fixed expense. Whether or not people use that data center to it's capacity doesn't change how much the operator pays (electricity use factors into this, since a GPU running at 100% will use more watts than an idle one, but it doesn't move the needle much on other fixed and variable costs of a data center).

> They also assumed, I imagine, that the cost of tokens would come down over time, versus what actually happened — while prices for some models might have come down, newer “reasoning” models burn way more tokens, which means the cost of inference has, somehow, gotten higher over time.

This is backwards. When the cost of something goes down, people use it more. This is basic supply and demand. Inference has gotten cheaper already, and will continue to do so.

Companies subsidizing costs for growth happens all the time. Yes, switching to usage-based pricing instead of subscriptions sucks for customers, but enterprises will continue to pay.