I wish that was inversely proportional. The less I pay, somehow it costs them more money.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Nice try, I ain't gonna pay anyway
Exactly, I just keep using the free plan and when I finish the amount for the day I just switch to another service
I can't imagine paying for AI when the open source tools have made it so easy to set up a model locally.
Don't be daft. The vast majority of people don't have the knowledge or resources to set that up locally.
Easy to set up, but still needs a 15k $ graphics card and electricity bill. The price you pay openai/anthropic is much cheaper than that for that quality of model.
Sure, you can setup a small model on a consumer graphics card, but the output will be considerably worse and the processing speed considerably lower.
For 240€/year you got a subscription to anthropic which will happily ingest a whole repository and process it in about one minute. No matter what latest model GPU you installed on your computer, you won't be able to do that.
Sure, this guy was able to run a 26B model on an old CPU: https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/
But that was not easy at all and the speed you get is definitely not the same as the one provided for a very cheap price.
I wonder how much they spend for every $0 I pay them.
$1000 I would guess. They are just burning money at this point.
I mean, this is no different than Walmart making prices low until other businesses die out and then raising them.
It is no different than police shoving all the homeless people and drug addicts into one area of town to crash the property prices, and then evicting them once developers buy everything for cheap.
They're purposely operating at a loss in the expectation that they can get ingrained into a ton of workflows, and then gouge everyone absolutely to death while also worsening the quality of the service to make it cheaper for them to run.
If it weren't so horrible for the environment, I'd kind of like it, because all the dumbass executives that are signing up for this are going to get exactly what they deserve. You'd think they'd recognize a scheme when they see one.
My CEO (whom I don't consider a particularly good or bad CEO) spent a day playing with AI then when asked if he'd sign the company up with the service he literally laughed in their faces and said it's useless. I was honestly shocked because he's totally into buzzword and popular crap. Gained a lot of respect for him that day.
An older co-worker seems to ask AI for help during work, we are blue collar. But the Owner of the company does not seem to use it whatsoever.
I ask Claude on occasion, to see if it will say something smart (it was mostly useless as fuck).
Honestly I think Claude it's good at programming. Way better than ChatGPT.
But I ain't going to pay for it.
Published a library doing some very specific data processing. One of the algorithms I implemented was a bit too slow: it would take about a week to process data. I reckon implementation was a little bit sloppy, but I've been implementing a bunch of algorithms from research papers and this was pretty much the published implementation.
I asked Claude to analyse the implementation and check whether it could be improved, half an hour later I got a 26,000% improvement in performance with exactly the same results passing all tests.
Of course, I could have done that myself. But optimization had to go down to simd level; I doubt I would have been able to do that in less than a week of work.
Trust me bro we're so close to profitability bro, just need this IPO to secure funding one last time bro then we'll be profitable bro I swear.
Oh come on bubble, why won't you crash already?
Now, I'm no MBA, but that seems like a bad business plan...
What is the actual “cost” after they buy the hardware, is that $1000 really pure power usage cost?
The problem is that the hardware has a 5 or 6 year depreciation schedule on paper, but NVIDIA keeps saying that their next generation chip will be twice as good as their last chip so there is a FOMO schedule of like every two years.
Would be nice to see that used hardware for sale rather than it being junked as a writeoff.
that's the $84,000 question. They're filling datacenters with the fastest possible equipment and need it to be 10x faster, That hardware is dinosaur fodder a year after they install it.
I'm curious as well. My knowledge is probably quite outdated, but from what I understood the training part is what's expensive and then querying the model is pretty cheap. Is it still true (or was it ever) that the generated answers on search engines are cheaper to generate than the actual search results?
I find that hard to believe, I recently had to uninstall co-pilot after it weaseled its way into my search bar. Its not an exageration to say that my PC literally ran cyberpunk 2077 with pathtracting better than it ran the fucking windows search bar with co-pilot.
That's just a shitty front end interface implementation, it has nothing to do with the actual inference run by the models.
Look at the public numbers, it seems true. Copilot on your taskbar is just windows being garbage, not the AI being bad. Just look at self-hosted AI and measure the power costs of your queries. It’s tiny.
It is sorta. Training is orders of magnitudes more intensive than inference, but we infer billions of times within a model generation.
The author is right and wrong. Its subsidised but not by anthropic. The power users who use their plans to the limit are subsidised by the rest of the users. Im an AI hater but I do think anthropic will be profitable next year. Their revenue growth is insane and looks to just be getting started. Claude code took enterprise by storm and now cowork is out.
no wonder why OpenAI is losing alot of money.
They'll never earn
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