[joshstrange]

Are frontier labs providing subscriptions at discount vs API token costs? Yes

However this entire video is slop. I don't know if it's actually AI slop but it's intellectual slop for sure.

Just the title alone is 100% disqualifying. They are using a monthly cost compared to the yearly [0] cost and also using the API token cost as the actual cost to the providers (which it's not, the actual cost is lower, the APIs, from everything we know, are _not_ being operated at a loss).

This whole video is a waste of your time. It's true that we are probably in Uber-phase of LLMs however a massive difference this time around is local inference (and other "open" models). If (US) frontier labs raise their prices then people can reach for the open models locally or using other cloud inference. And all of this assumes a moat, which so far doesn't seem to exist. The open models trail SOTA but not by more than a year or so (I've heard 6mo thrown around a lot).

Either the SOTA models will be priced too high to be worth it and we will move to open/lower-cost (local or otherwise) models or they will continue to provide a benefit over then lower/free models and be worth paying for.

[0] With _zero_ evidence to back up that number