I’m not sure whether AI companies can keep going with these low costs. My workflow is already completely merged into AI. I don’t want to go back to digging through Stack Overflow and spending an hour writing 100 lines of code like before.
I feel very confident making the assertion that if you work a white collar job, and cannot find $200/mo worth of value in the current crop of SOTA models/agents, you probably don't actually know how to wield their abilities.
For those who do, the models could be worth upwards of $5,000 month easy.
I don't see how the cost of inferencing existing models can become prohibitive. Multiple providers are selling DeepSeek 4.1 Flash tokens at just above cost, and seem to be doing so profitably.
What we do potentially lose out on are the next few generations of models in the case of a market correction, as the big labs won't be able to afford training anymore.
Those providers don't have the compute to meaningfully undercut the private labs.
The reason it's so cheap is because they have compute sitting idle. Meanwhile the big players are rate limiting, using quotas, and keep prices high to keep enough compute available to meet demand.
