Who's lifetime? The lifetime of the service, or until whoever is running it loses interest in it? This doesn't seem like a "forever" situation - forever is a really long time.

I run a cloud service side-hustle and I'd never make these kinds of claims.

I've been looking for a new job where people aren't so reckless... the AI psychosis is heavy at my current job.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl?inline

Where I work, the LLM writes the ticket and does all the coding. As soon as the LLM feels like it's done, it automatically submits and reviews the PR itself. The humans blindly click "approve" without reading the PR. And when the required number of humans have blindly clicked approve, a human blindly presses another button that merges the code. All the text in the ticket, the code, the PR and review is far too voluminous and verbose to easily read, so nobody does. These humans didn't start out as vibe coders, they used to be engineers.

How do you think this will work out for us?

After they rejected me I had to point out that their test is selecting for the cheaters.

Have you seen who we elect to run our countries?

I was told I'm not supposed to read pull requests at my job anymore (we all do agentic coding now), I'm just supposed to click "approve" on PRs because for some stupid reason it still requires several humans to approve the PR. Instead of reading PRs, we're all telling the AI to do more work to create even more PRs. It's not a good way forward, and I'm looking for another job.

>If hosted solutions get too expensive, people will selfhost.

To self-host a frontier-adjacent model at speed comparable to a commercial API, you're looking at roughly $250k-500k to buy or $20-35k/month to rent the GPUs. And that's only enough to operate at current "frontier" model capability, and buying also doesn't include the massive amounts of electricity it will cost every month to run that hardware. Admittedly I used AI to come up with those figures, so take it with a grain of salt, but judging from how much these AI companies are spending, it tracks that they are consuming massive amounts of money on a per-user basis just to gain market share. I've tried to self-host AI and it sucks. I wouldn't use it for coding.

>I think AI is here to stay.

Sure it is, but it may not cost what you think it should cost.

The AI companies are doing the exact same thing - operating at massive losses (far more than Uber ever did, to an extreme extent), trying to "win" the AI arms race, playing a game of chicken with their competitors.