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- Hacker News
- I wonder whether Oracle is going to go bankrupt because of this
- Why Oracle?by worldsayshi
- One of the purposes of open weight models is to create a moat. If there were no open models available, I think we'd see much more and better models coming from Europe by now. Right now, any startup wanting to build and sell a model needs to be substantially better than the open models, which has become increasingly difficult and expensive.by bmnbmnbmn
- Europe has Mistral.
You and readers may be interested in Europe 2031
by tuatoru - One issue I keep seeing with cost comparisons is that they compare API rates while a substantial fraction of users are on subscription plans.
It's more expensive to use GLM 5.2 paying z.ai or Opencode Zen API rates than it is to use Opus on a subscription plan. Both of those providers offer subscriptions priced favorably relative to their API rates, but only in what are effectively trial sizes.
by Zak - And that means either:
1. They overprice their APIs to make their subscriptions look reasonable
2. They burn money with their subscriptions
by 1matin - Enterprise plans don't have the equivalent of the subsidized-usage-included Claude Max/ChatGPT Pro plans anymore. The revenue generated and total amount of tokens used by individuals is probably a tiny fraction of tokens billed at API pricing.
- Open weight and local hosting is far, far cheaper. In every respect. Even support is cheaper, over time.
However, it's difficult to sell this to businesses who want contracts and KPIs, not staff and commitments.
Regulated industries will favour the closed sources, either by choice or mandate. The interesting question is whether they will have better models, or worse models. History says they will receive a worse service, but continue anyway.
by anax32 - > Regulated industries will favour the closed sources, either by choice or mandate
Until your country will appear on naughty list of US administration because your local politician did something what mildly inconvenienced US oligarch
by general1465 - Cheaper until you factor in security and liability, which are going to get increasingly salient over time.by tuatoru
- This is what concerns me about how AI giants are planning to make money. Their product has already been commoditized at prices which for them are still subsidized to grab market share. Unless the giants invent a technological leap, their prices are going to be dragged down by open weight models and I don't see how they'll turn a profit.by odie5533
- Reach AGI to leapfrog whoever is behind. Burn everything to get there faster.by Jimega36
- With cache hit rates being effectively free, harnesses like Reasonix have let me do a month of work for less than 2 dollars. It's not even the subsidies making it cheap, American providers like Digital Ocean or Cloudflare host the same model with similar pricing.by arikrahman
- How does caching help here? How much repetition is there in queries?by pjc50
- Cloudflare's Deepseek V4 Pro prices are 4x more than Deepseek's for input and output tokens, and 100x more for cached input tokens, which is crucial for the tool uses of agents which cause multi-turn conversations.by Scaevolus
- I think this is very likely and something that everyone seems to be missing when valuing these AI firms. AI is not the new industrial revolution, it's the new cloud VM: a very useful commodity software offering.
- I don’t get it. So many here are saying open weight models will kill the frontier labs. But open source and similar have tried to beat private companies everywhere all the time, and people still buy the best products even if great open source alternatives are available. Why wouldn’t this be the case for AI too?by beepdyboop
- the difference here is that switching is trivial due to standardized APIs to the underlying LLM capability.
harness <-> gateway <-> inference provider
Easy to switch any of them and (mostly) possible to combine any with any
Replacing something like Excel is crazy-hard because of network effects, replacing an Enterprise CRM is akin to a removing a metastasizing cancer
by mxschumacher - Yes. Many industries are zero-sum-ish in nature,have winner-take-all dynamics or reputational costs for cheaping out. Financial trading. Big law. Military. National Security. Big insurance. Management consulting. Advertising.
For others even a small edge can be important. Pharma and Biochem research. Research in general. Any industry where there are major reputational risks.
It may not make sense to use the most expensive model to replace your payroll clerk, but there are plenty of use cases for the best available.
by tuatoru - The closest example I can think of is using a proprietary hosted database versus a self hosted open source option, like Oracle vs Postgres. OpenAI and Anthropic are each individually privately valued over $1T and Oracle is currently valued at half that. They’re not worthless, but they’re severely overvalued.by an0malous
- I feel like this comment is just engagement farming, but I'll bite anyways
there is a larger appetite for something like open source AI mostly b/c of price. we all know these labs have not figured out their pricing model, and we're all holding our breath out of fear of what the prices could be.
also, if you consider that the only toll to knowledge work before was personal time, and now you need to pay $100s month just to keep up with the baseline speed. it makes sense people are looking for something that gets them back to a workflow where the price to do work is near $0.00.
I think for a smaller group though, it's more to do with a certain combination of principles. Some people don't want censorship, other's want ownership, some want the knowledge of working on LLMs to not be gate kept.
by drudolph914 - One thing it doesn't even mention is how good those models are. Evet since I moved to DeepSeek I had zero regrets. It performs exceptionally well. I honestly prefer it to ChatGPT (or Claude that I use at work).
I never used Fable, maybe it is that much better. DeepSeek has no problems with the workloads I give it though - if it only keeps marginally improving with each interaction I don't see myself needing to come back.
- It would not be surprising if GPT and Claude get cheaper too as inference gets cheaper. Two years ago, o1 was the strongest model and cost much more than Fable, while being nowhere near as smart as a Qwen 3.6 35B that you can now run on a DGX Spark without much trouble.by linzhangrun
- Probably they will, unless Claude and GPT become luxury brands like Gucci. Currently it makes no sense for them to invest into efficiency. They need to put everything into competing for the top spot as long as they still have a shot.by tsss
- True, outside of the dark tactics I imagined in the article, they will have to compete at lower costs. It's just that the current iteration does not feel cost competitive yet.by ddxv
- > It would not be surprising if GPT and Claude get cheaper too as inference gets cheaper
No because the biggest factor in their current price is VC subsidization which has likely peaked if OpenAI is now serving ads and Anthropic has increased their API pricing
by an0malous - Let's imagine that Anthropic/OpenAI fail to manufacture scarcity by villainizing Open Weight models (a sincere probability). What is left for these corporations to prop up their prices, or any margin at all? I expect scaffolding around tool use, supporting bespoke implementation and driving risk down for institutional adoption. (They might even build an insurance tool to protect accountants/lawyers from errors in compounded probabilism!)
A question for economists... It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?
- OpenAI, though they seem to backtrack it lately, have been slowly pushing forward of their launch of ads which would be a supplemental way to support cheaper use of their models. This is currently not as great a fit as the modern day banner ads, but it will be interesting to see where they go with that.by ddxv
- > It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?
Isn't this the thing people have said about every new technology since the printing press? And it has been mostly true, but it has also been the case that the incumbents have fought hard to lock things back up again. Newspapers and radio stations buy each other up, the open web gets locked inside Facebook (which, 30 years ago, people were already worried about with AOL), people have computers in their pockets they can't run their own programs on anymore.
Interests are going to want to lock the new information thing behind a gate so they can charge a toll and censor what they don't like, same as it ever was. You don't win by default, you have to fight to stop them.
by AnthonyMouse - > What worries me about this is that Anthropic and OpenAI seem to have backed themselves into a corner of high costs. Can they reasonably decrease their prices by 20-50x to compete with DeepSeek or Xiaomi’s Mimo?
They have high prices, not high costs. They will obviously keep prices as high as they can for as long as they can, while keeping demand up. Once demand starts to fall, so will the prices.
> Are these models cheap because they are open weight and having hundreds or people stress test running them on different hardware helped to lower the cost? Or is it that they are being provided as loss leaders to drive the prices down?
Neither. They are cheap because they have neither technical edge nor brand power to keep the prices high, and so have to ask commodity prices for them.
People somehow still don't get it, despite everyone who studies the economics of it telling them: Inference is dirt cheap. Training is expensive, inference is cheap, and getting cheaper.
by Tuna-Fish