I just used GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark for a simple implementation and it ran out of usage in under 5 minutes.
*This* is what will ultimately cause the current business model to fail outside of big tech and enterprise.
You can't claim the correct usage of an LLM is to pop it in a verification loop, while also charging a per-token access/usage fee that means it's unusable for that purpose.
Perhaps in a few years we'll see local LLMs that work well on consumer hardware with the same capabilities?
@tonyarnold It’s also not clear if they’re making money at API rates. They don’t supply “all in” numbers and training is getting expensive. They’re definetly losing money at the monthly rates. That means they can’t afford to supply the models to anyone.
The increased training costs will be a problem for the open models too.
@colincornaby I had someone at work straight-faced say that the costs of these tools and workflows are approaching zero. Their claim was that we were getting more for our money over time, but that is a very manipulative definition of “approaching zero”.
It will be very interesting to see what happens here around pricing/access over the coming years.
@colincornaby i think it’s quite likely the current crop of companies will collapse, much like the blockchain-focused companies before them did.
We’ll be left with some really interesting tooling regardless of the existence of pay-per-play orgs like Anthropic and OpenAI.
@tonyarnold Yeah, it depends how much companies like Deepseek are actually stealing data from OpenAI and Anthropic. If that is going on they may not be able to train further models either.
I think the whole game is really human engineer replacement. _If_ you can just get rid of the humans and their salaries those rates look more sane.
@colincornaby I have credible doubts about whether replacement of human engineers is even possible.
Don't let reality get in the way of a good investor pitch, though.
Tony Arnold
Colin Cornaby