[burnte]

> Will there be the same overutilisation occurring if users have to financially support the infrastructure, either through subscriptions or intrusive advertising? > I doubt it.

I agree. Right now a lot of AI tools are underpriced to get customers hooked, then they'll jack up the prices later. The flaw is that AI does not have the ubiquitous utility internet access has, and a lot of people are not happy with the performance per dollar TODAY, much less when prices rise 80%. We already see companies like Google raising prices stating it's for "AI" and we customers can't opt out of AI and not pay the fee.

At my company we've already decided to leave Google Workspace in the spring. GW is a terrible product with no advanced features, garbage admin tools, uncompetitive pricing, and now AI shoved in everywhere and no way to granularly opt out of a lot of it. Want spell check? Guess what, you need to leave Gemini enabled! Shove off, Google.

[czhu12]

I am totally on the other end of the spectrum. For $20 a month, the amount of value I get from ChatGPT is incredible. I can talk to it in voice mode to help brainstorm ideas, it teaches me about different subjects, it (+ claude code) helps me write boilerplate code so I can spend more time doing things I enjoy.

I'm going through the process of buying a home, and the amount of help its given is incredible. Analyzing disclosures, loan estimates, etc. Our accountant charges $200 an hour to basically confirm all the same facts that ChatGPT already gave us. We can go into those meetings prepped with 3 different scenarios that ChatGPT already outlined, and all they have to do is confirm.

Its true that its not always correct, but, I've also had paid specialists like real estate agents and accountants give me incorrect information, at the cost of days of scheduling, and hundreds of dollars. They also aren't willing to answer questions at 2am in the morning.

[burnte]

> For $20 a month, the amount of value I get from ChatGPT is incredible.

I agree. Wait until it's $249 a month. You'll feel differently.

[yumraj]

At $249/month the market adoption will crash resulting in somewhere in the middle pricing that the market can bear

Competition and local SLMs will also provide a counter to massive price increase

[tw04]

> At $249/month the market adoption will crash resulting in somewhere in the middle pricing that the market can bear

Or much like what is going to happen with Alexa, it just dies because the cost of the service is never going to align with “what the market can bear”. Even at $75/mo, the average person will probably stop being lazy and just go back to doing 10 minutes worth of searching to find answers to basic questions.

[burnte]

This is what I believe will happen. Once pricing is raised to sustainable levels (regardless of profit) I think the customer base will drop off.

[yumraj]

That is also a possibility

[Bombthecat]

Even for 500 a month, it's still a lot of value, especially for companies, if two guys with a subscription can replace one person. It's worth it

[czhu12]

For what its worth, I already pay 20 for Chatgpt + 100 / month for Claude Code.

[avgDev]

Well in some areas, the professionals are on the hook if they are incorrect, ChatGPT is not.

[johnnienaked]

I learned today there are people who upload personal information to chatbots

[UncleOxidant]

I feel like I can get all of that for free already. Not sure why I would pay a monthly subscription when I'm already getting Gemini across the Google ecosystem.

[czhu12]

Yeah the premise of the comment is that at some point prices will have to raised, and when that happens, if people will churn

[forgetfreeman]

Lol what. Analyzing disclosures? What information of use could it possibly synthesize from a three column table with checkmarks in [no disclosure]? For your sake I sincerely hope you aren't using ChatGPT when you should be getting inspections.

[czhu12]

Unfortunately in SF at the moment, it seems basically all competitive offers need to waive inspection. Which is also what we did

The sellers already had an inspection done. The full report is over 100 pages

[forgetfreeman]

Who told you to waive inspection?

[phil21]

Inspections are fairly worthless if you are remotely handy and competent at basic stuff. I don’t need someone to go through and catalog the make and models of all the appliances, and I can visually inspect my own water heater and furnace pretty trivially.

You can get “real” inspections done but they cost thousands of dollars and take a full or more day to do with multiple subject matter experts. Almost no one does this.

Waiving inspection other than for major material defect is what I’ve done for all my real estate transactions. I’m not putting in an offer to nickel and dime someone over trivial bullshit like a busted GFCI circuit. My offer simply accounts for the trivial odds and ends I’ll have to take care of. Plus I’d much rather get the work done myself since I don’t trust a seller to do anything but the bare minimum.

Every one of my friends who have had five figures or more of surprise repair work on homes they purchased all had an inspection done. None of those could have found the various hidden damages for those buildings short of destructive stuff like pulling drywall out or lifting up shingles from a roof. Don’t worry though, the inspectors found stuff like a bathroom faucet with a crack in the knob.

[johnnienaked]

Waiving inspection is waiving seller liability, you know that right?

[CamperBob2]

The market.

[burnte]

That's a bubble.

[beepbopboopp]

> Will there be the same overutilisation occurring if users have to financially support the infrastructure, either through subscriptions or intrusive advertising? > I doubt it.

Yea, I think this is wrong. The analogy is more like the App Store, in that there is very little to do currently other than a better Google Search with the product. The bet is that over time (short time) there are much more financially valuable use cases with a more mature ecosystem and tech.

[echelon]

That's it.

We're in the "dial up era" of AI.

Unlike the smartphone adoption era where everything happened rather rapidly, we're in this weird place where labs have invented a bunch of model categories, but they aren't applicable to a wide variety of problems yet.

The dial up -> broadband curve took almost a decade to reach penetration and to create the SaaS market. It's kind of a fluke that Google and Amazon came out of the dial up era - that's probably what investors were hoping for by writing such large checks.

They found chat as one type of product. Image gen as another. But there's really not much "native AI" stuff going about. Everyone is bolting AI onto products and calling it a done day (or being tasked with clueless leadership to do it with even worse results).

This is not AI. This is early cycle WebVan-type exploration. The idea to use AI in a given domain or vertical might be right, but the tools just don't exist yet.

We don't need AI models with crude APIs. We need AI models we can pull off the shelf, fine tune, and adapt to novel UI/UX.

Adobe is showing everyone how they're thinking about AI in photoshop - their latest conference showed off AI-native UX. And it was really slick. Dozens of image tools (relighting, compositing, angle adjustment) that all felt fast, magical, and approachable as a beginner. Nobody else is doing that. They're just shoving a chat interface in your hands and asking you to deal with it.

We're too early. AI for every domain isn't here yet.

We're not even in the dialup era, honestly.

I'd expect the best categories of AI to invest in with actually sound financials will be tool vendors (OpenRouter, FAL, etc.) and AI-native PLG-type companies.

Enterprise is not ready. Enterprise does not know what the hell to do with these APIs.

[gboss]

Where are you moving to?

[hotpaper75]

Best Comment

[LMSolar]

Yes, where are you moving to from GW? We're looking for options...

[lelanthran]

I've got 4 different chat windows open on 4 free plans. That's not counting the free IDE-autocomplete I use.

In any given day I never have no access to free LLM help.

Since all the models are converging onto the same level of performance, I mostly can't even tell responses from ChatGPT and Claude apart.

> Right now a lot of AI tools are underpriced to get customers hooked, then they'll jack up the prices later.

Good luck with that. I mean it.

The ChatAI TAM is now so saturated with free offerings that the first supplier to blink will go out of business before they are done blinking.

I see people (like sibling reply to parent) boasting about the amount of value they get from the $20/m subscription, but I don't see how that is $20 better than just using the free ChatAIs.

The only way out of the red for ChatAI products is to add in advertising slowly; they have to boil the frog. A subscription may have made sense when ChatGPT was the only decent game in town. Subscriptions don't make sense now - I can get 90% of the value of a ChatAI for 0% of the cost.