[rjh29]

A few days ago Gemini redid their rate limits, making images/audio/video generation much more expensive, shrunk limits across the board (including a new weekly limit) and added more expensive tiers.

At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.

[andybak]

I agree that heavy users are probably not profitable but that's the way the economics of subscription services tends to work across the board.

I'm arguing that even if inference isn't profitable right now it's not orders of magnitude off. Whatever pricing emerges for models equivalent to current frontier models won't be significantly higher than the current API pricing.

There are already enough small companies without tons of VC money to burn that are serving up nearly-frontier llms at prices lower than the big players are charging. They can't all be subsidising? These are companies without any moat or any IP.