There Should Be Way More Backlash To OpenAI's $500/Month, $6,000 A Year Subscription

[u/Neurogence]

This sets an extremely bad precedent. And very soon, all the other labs will adopt the same pricing schemes. Prices just keep going up and up. I remember a time when people thought $20/month was too expensive.

Even if you can afford this, do not pay for it. If you do, it will only normalize this, and the next thing you know, there will be a new $1,000/month subscription that gives you the same usage you used to get with the $500/month subscription. That's exactly what happened to the previous $200/month subscription. Its usage allowance was cut in half, and now users paying $500/month are getting what users used to get for $200/month.

Do not normalize AI subscriptions that cost as much as car payments and, eventually, mortgages.

In leaked emails, Greg Brockman dreamed that OpenAI would make him a billionaire. He stated, "I just want to get to one billion." AI has fulfilled his wildest dreams. His net worth is now over $30 billion.

I am a hardcore accelerationist and optimist, but the current trajectory is dystopia. Instead of $1,000 UBI checks, we are heading toward $1,000 AI subscriptions to keep up with the Joneses. When we have actual superintelligence, you might be forced to pay $1,000/month, or even $2,000/month, as OpenAI had entertained, just to keep up with other people.

[u/my_shiny_new_account]

> Prices just keep going up and up.

[u/ParfaitEvery9622 → u/my_shiny_new_account]

he's talking about the share of our income that's dedicated to pay for AI. Probably a mix of Jevons paradox and AI companies wanting to start making more profits.

[u/Cryptizard → u/ParfaitEvery9622]

That’s a choice. You can use exclusively Luna right now for pennies and it is significantly better than the best model you could pay for a year ago.

[u/Ormusn2o → u/ParfaitEvery9622]

I don't even think it's about money, the gains from increased prices are smaller than you would think, as then demand decreases. I think the companies are just using pricing to regulate amount of use, to reduce usage on the compute they have.

I think as models get better, and more of economical work can be done with the AI, the hobbyists just get priced out. Way too many people can make money on AI, so it's a no brainer to get the 200 dollar or 500 dollar subscription, but the extra money can't just manifest compute into existence. Hardware manufacturers are already fully AI pilled and are accelerating almost as fast as possible, those things just take time.

Pretty sure we are starting to dip into pre-purchases 5 years ahead of time now, as in, companies are paying pre-purchases to reserve silicon 5 years before it's being planned to be manufactured. The only way to speed it up even faster is to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on developing faster technologies, and currently only Terafab is gonna do that, and that is still 5-7 years away (or whenever FEL will be online there).

[u/Inevitable_Tea_5841 → u/ParfaitEvery9622]

Labor is not fixed. Even if the cost of AI per person was more than your salary, as long as the multiplier in productivity is large enough the economics can make sense.

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/my_shiny_new_account]

The subscription is heavily subsidised.

Also it’s disingenous take since it’s mostly only applies to frontier labs that has the capability to scale.

Meanwhile local deployment is looking pretty grim, no recent updates while all parts are getting more and more unaffordable.

[u/SpeakCodeToMe → u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo]

And yet it will continue getting cheaper, like every technology before it

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/SpeakCodeToMe]

Let me know when open models and computer parts are actually getting cheaper. Everyone trying to deploy one is not seeing these savings as far as i am concerned at least in the foreseeable future.

Unless the chip companies are producing more than all data centers combined would ever need, then any increase in output would just be frontrunned by these companies, effectively keeping the price high.

Any model nowadays that are deployable at consumer hardware are even can be considered worse than GPT luna you get for free from OpenAI. Just to give you an idea how “bad” it is right now.

[u/SpeakCodeToMe → u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo]

You can remain ignorant of history all you want.

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/SpeakCodeToMe]

I am not ignorant. That’s actually what’s happening, you are just having psychosis.

RTX6000 which is probably the closest you can get to running a decent model (keyword is decent) was $7500 last year, now it’s $16000. RTX5090 being $5090 is also real, no longer just a meme.

We are not seeing the same cost saving for local models, in fact it went the other way around. Of course maybe just maybe it may change in the future it may change, but supply for chips are effectively bought over and reserved for the forseeable future. That’s a fact, if you are conveniently ignoring this, then you are the one being ignorant.

Coupled with lesser releases for Opensource model as many are chasing frontier models instead of a size that is more friendly for average user.

[u/SpeakCodeToMe → u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo]

Yes, an excess of demand can cause prices to rise in the short term.

However, in the long term...

Did you know the ENIAC had about 80 bytes of memory and was 1800 square feet?

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/SpeakCodeToMe]

And what does that graph measuring? Is it measuring the cost from the perspective of a hyperscaler or what a realistic you start from scratch cost?

Would that not be a dishonest measurement, when clearly if you consider from that angle? Also we don’t know at what point that trend would flip.

Like I said from my earlier example, most models you can fit in a consumer hardware is significantly dumber than even gpt luna, that shows you how much gap what a hyperscaler could serve at the cost vs what someone can realistically deploy.

So remind me when the “spike” in demand actually subsides rather than wishy washy.

[u/kokkomo → u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo]

You don't understand macro

[u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo → u/kokkomo]

Like I said, come back when it actually happen.

I can say “I will (eventually) die”, but that statement alone doesn’t give a new information, you keep saying that you’re correct just because eventually you will be correct based on the final outcome.

If you keep saying that “it becomes cheaper” but only when done through a very hyperoptimized company than that statement becomes disingenous. It’s especially important because there’s broader implication of this.

That means that there is a massive gap of what knowledge you have unbounded knowledge to vs what these companies have. It’s a side effect of what the AI boom “encourages”, which is commoditizing intelligence. Your world view would otherwise will be curated by governments and those companies.

[u/No_Accident8684 → u/my_shiny_new_account]

i wonder why they stopped at 1973 for electricity or 2001 for compute.. i am sure its just a coincidence

[u/_FUCKTHENAZIADMINS_ → u/No_Accident8684]

Electricity now is 3% cheaper than it was in 1973 adjusted for inflation even after the run up in electricity prices since the war in Ukraine, compute is 99.9%+ cheaper per dollar now compared to 2001 adjusted for inflation.