| > I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening. I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly. If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software. Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say. The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low. $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it. I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group. This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you. |
Your entire hypothetical is based on "ifs" that aren't true. Nothing in this sentence is true. You don't need AI to create software, the cost of AI development is much less than $200/month on average, and many more people can afford AI dev than programming bootcamps or classes or degrees.
> Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.
Inference is already profitable at current pricing. Most funding goes toward R&D for new model training, not inference.
Also, inference costs dropped over 280x between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024. Inference will continue to get cheaper as we develop more specialized hardware and efficient models.
This is not Uber, subsidizing the cost of human drivers. This is real tech, chips and servers and software. Costs fall over time, not rise. Innovation does not go backwards.