this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
101 points (94.7% liked)
Technology
84281 readers
3330 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They're kinda past that phase and now need to show that they have sustainable revenue and user growth. From all the numbers I've seen they(open ai, Gemini, anthropic) have crazy numbers. Hundreds of millions of users paying $50 a month. It's not enough to cover training but it covers inference very nicely.
Then with agent bullshit they've managed to turn 1 prompt into 12 and bill the user for that extra so it's even more profitable than the monthly subscriptions.
If it weren't for the massive silicon supply lockdown, I feel like we could easily see local models making it into consumer tech in the coming years and effectively replace all those casual users since you no longer have to pay a subscription to do regular/low effort tasks on whatever device you own. A lot of it has gotten really good, especially with lots of quantization techniques getting superseded by new ones each year.
Actually I guess it could probably go the same way as cable and streaming. Eventually they'll keep amping up the ante with the billing (because they always do), and people will just get turned off into a bunch of "cheaper" 3rd parties that have lower costs with some niche tricks, which will fragment the userbase too much.
Also I haven't looked into it, but do they advertise those $50 users separately from enterprise? I don't really know anyone outside of "power" users that aren't just using the $20 a month basic plans that give you enough tokens to get by (for now).
I feel like they're inflating their numbers from enterprise estimates because that's where they can bait with cheap API prices and then hook with vendor lock in.
If that’s true, you make a good point. Sounds like they could keep the business model around inference. They’d just need to figure out how to make up the budget for training, which I imagine could be done with good marketing on new releases. As well as finding ways to use more tokens, injecting ads, selling data, investors, … did I miss anything? It doesn’t sound impossible if the inference portion is as lucrative as you say.
That's a hell of a lot better than .com had back in the day: hundreds of millions of "hits" on their websites, with no proof if there was even a human connected to the request.
I think there's a whole lot of variability of user experience out there still, and that's some of what is getting shaken out of the systems - new models are better for some, worse for others. Overall, I think they are still improving, quite dramatically for software creation in the past 12 months, but as they grow in their specialty skills, some of the users who were getting better results for other things do get hurt in the process.
If there ever is such a thing as GenAI, I suspect it will follow the medical model of your General Practitioner referring you to specialists as warranted.