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  • Hacker News
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.

    by surgical_fire
  • 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
  • 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?

    by arthurofbabylon
  • > 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
  • The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options:

    1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities.

    2) own the app layer with their edge in reputation and powered by their infrastructure. Be apple where everyone else is Linux. Do design, coding, research, SMBs, legal, finance, healthcare and more (they are doing all of this).

    Will it be enough to justify a Google level valuation? We’ll see how fast they can push it.

    by Jackobrien

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