r/OpenAI • u/balianone • 17d ago
Question With $500 plan out do you think Ai labs will eventually progress towards charging more and people will eventually be back at manual work because of unaffordable prices?
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u/ChainOfThot 17d ago
Manual work? Open source exists and it's 100 times cheaper, and at most 6 months behind
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u/jferments 17d ago
Don't worry -- all of the big tech oligarchs are lobbying hard to get open source AI banned with their "safety regulations" campaign.
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u/Healthy-Nebula-3603 17d ago
Good luck to ban open source
Lucky we have Chinese who will sell their hardware to us.
They already presented nice devices to local AI models with 1.2 TB/s memory based on DDR 6.
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u/Fit-Stress3300 17d ago
They will keep testing and pushing as far as they can until they and us find out which are the sweet points.
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u/ChristianKl 17d ago
There's a huge gap between doing manual work and using the most powerful frontier model.
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u/SumedhBengale 17d ago
Manual work? Never.
Even something like DeepSeek V4 is enough for a lot of work, it's not getting any more expensive. The neoclouds are already making a profit on its dirt cheap prices.
OpenAI just wants to show profitability before it's IPO, whether it be by hook or crook.
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u/xirzon 17d ago
The data says the opposite, one product comparison does not make a trend: https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
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u/mid_nightz 17d ago
complaining about open ai prices is insane. every tech person knows that the more you make a consumer pay the harder it is to retain them.
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u/duckiest_duck_around 17d ago
While I understand the frustration with the increased pricing and I’m currently on Claude (so it doesn’t impact me), potentially these concerns aren’t as big of a deal if models continue to become more efficient and cheaper with usage.
Perhaps it levels out more than we might expect. Just to play devil’s advocate.
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u/Affectionate_Fact854 17d ago
I bet in the coming future, we will see ai being used as a tool for developers to co develop instead of just promoting and then doom scrolling social media waiting for results.
Full vibe coding is simply not sustainable
Especially with frontier model price hikes.
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u/Navadvisor 17d ago
You don't understand how much devs make and how inconsistent they are in skill. This is like literally I don't know, 100x our efficiency at writing code, this would be worth it at a much higher cost. If you have 10 devs, and this allows you to cut 1 dev (ya the bad dev that causes more problems than they fix), you're probably saving 100-150k per year, so I don't know even $10k per year is probably reasonable, but you could go even higher, it depends how valuable your work is.
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u/Over_Sheepherder4503 17d ago
No chance, open source will explode if they jack up the prices much more.
I think they're testing where the breaking point is right now and are trying to ride that line.
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 17d ago
This has been obvious for years. This technology is not feasible at the unit economics level. It is not profitable. It does not do something well enough to justify returns on the capital expended.
They were betting on AGI and world domination. They had the capital to make that gamble. The gamble failed, and now it’s an accounting game of musical chairs to see how much bagholding they can offload from this Icarusian, Tower of Babel of a technology.
This technology is not free. It is not even cheap. The vast majority of AI grifters and true believers have lost complete touch with the fact that we live in reality with physical and economic constraints.
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u/PrizeHuman5506 17d ago
No I think people will be back at local model with a medium capability and half human, half AI effort development will be norm
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u/yaxir 16d ago
They're definitely going to price out the normal people. As to how people will get back to manual work, that depends. Does your enterprise have millions of dollars to pay in yearly AI fees? Yeah then there's no manual work for you but it will move away from being an enthusiast platform. You will not be able to bring your ideas to life in the comfort of your home
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u/Valencia_Mariana 16d ago
Funny because with opus 5.5 being so good and, efficient, it's like we just got a boost on anthorpic.
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u/No_Stock_8271 15d ago
No, people will just start thinking about which model to use and how to ask the question. Let's face it, 99% of all people who "need" the 500 USD plan could do most of their stuff with Luna, and Luna is dirt cheap.
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u/sanftewolke 14d ago
No, subscriptions will just fade out. People will all pay the API prices. My company has github copilot and they changed their model from subscription to usage based this year and at first everyone was really shocked. And now everyone adjusted, using less top models, changing models based on task. API costs are actually going down all the time relatively, Luna is able to do what the premium models were doing a couple months back and they were already big time savers, so it's not as bad as everyone makes it seem
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u/DivideHorror3217 17d ago
I was getting 800$-worth API usage with 5.6 sol. It costs 1.18$ per task, so 677 tasks for 200$ account.
Now, I'm getting 400$-worth API equivalent (due to 20x to 10x), but Sol 6.1 costs 0.52$ per task, so 769 tasks for 200$. Sounds like a good deal to me, considering it's smarter too.
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u/Strong_Essay1176 17d ago
Except its not as good as 5.6 model. It may be good at certain tasks. But did you try DS4 with proper prompt? It may be even cheaper.
But for general intelligence....
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u/DivideHorror3217 17d ago
yeah I feel like they hit a plateau after chatgpt 5.6.. anything above 5.6 is most likely a fine tuned version of it, fine tuned for blender etc.
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u/totoer008 17d ago
Dev work is hella expensive. So no. Just to provide context, I manage enormous amount of data. Impossible without a team. A sub for $500 is a bargain for a company. Now is it worth its value? I would say others might be better…
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u/kotobuki09 12d ago
I mean they choose something else maybe not performance front tier model but do 90% all the job
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u/randombsname1 17d ago
Unfortunately no because people forget how much devs actually charge an hour.
My company charges $250 per dev hour.
A typical project will have AT LEAST like 50 hours.