[hungryhobbit]

I don't think whether "LLMs are actually changing the State of the Art" or not matters for anything he wrote.

If the AI companies need $X billion in revenue to stay afloat, it doesn't matter if 0.5% or 5% or 50% of that revenue is from transforming the State of the Art. It's 100% irrelevant: what matters is that, transformation or no, these companies won't have the income to pay their bills. And if they can't pay their bills, a whole lot of other companies can't either.

So again, transformation or no, it's still a house of cards waiting to collapse. The only thing that would change that is not more "transformation" ... it's a feature set that lets them multiply their current user base (or multiply how much they charge them) several times over.

[anthonypasq]

maybe its insane to think this, but if all AI providers turned off free plans tomorrow i think they would easily have enough people willing to pay $20 a month for it to sustain all their spending.

everyone is still fighting for market share so they are giving stuff away, but that doesnt mean people wouldnt be willing to pay for it if it wasnt free.

[FromTheFirstIn]

This proposition boils down to a belief that there are 3 billion people who are interested in AI for free but aren’t currently paying $20, but who would pay $20 if that was the price. The global median income is around $12k, so this would mean that there’s roughly be a global budget of 0.5% of everyone’s annual income going to chatbots. If you’re off by half, the price doubles for each person. I think you’d make a lot of money betting against the existence of 3 billion ghost customers

[brokenmachine]

I wouldn't.