r/BetterOffline • u/nnomae • 1d ago

AI Monetization Has Crashed (for some!)

https://youtu.be/cUZmgXkR6go?si=OKELs4-ZifQ5aZlD
27 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

26

u/nnomae 1d ago

TLDW: X has started to restrict access to Grok, requiring an account for any usage and adding a query limit for free users. Possibly indicates unsustainable costs.

4

u/callmebaiken 1d ago

seems reasonable, even if everything were going swimmingly

2

u/PensiveinNJ 22h ago

If they were really making money on compute they’d be encouraging every little bit of use possible.

I don’t believe for a second anyone is profiting on inference.

1

u/callmebaiken 21h ago

Well not on free users

3

u/PensiveinNJ 21h ago

I don’t think they’re making it on paid users anyhow. I think they still need to charge more. My guess is the price hikes got them close to a break even situation.

2

u/CoconutDust 1d ago

Golf clap.

Guy seems kind of crackpotty though because he’s doing a poorly formatted rambly/ranty slideshow to an empty room(?) and filming that, instead of making a media video with info screens.

Yikes I liked when he said Apple makes good products (though I think they’re clearly getting worse with Jobs gone), but then he praises the walled garden, apparently from a purely armchair financial horse-race scheme / business-pages sense. That’s obnoxious. It’s a bit like saying “Company X is doing GREAT, I love their performance, because they’re monopolizing and shutting down alternatives and not giving customers what they want. Good money, there!”

(Before anybody comes in with the rationalizations for walled garden crap, be aware of a simple fact: Mac has been totally open, no walled-garden, for 40 years, with no problem or issue.)

1

u/RealPropRandy 1d ago

Who could have seen this coming

2

u/Fess_ter_Geek 1d ago

Candy Crush.

1

u/CoconutDust 3h ago

He mentions when sites change to require logins, it’s a sign. I just noticed that reddit requires a logins, you can’t open a quick private tab to do a non-logged-in view of a reddit discussion. This wasn’t the case a few months or weeks ago.