They’re heavily subsidizing the costs to gain users who otherwise probably won’t be interested in the service at a sustainable cost. Every company is hiding their inference costs, but it’s clear that every user is currently burning far more than they’re generating in revenue. The hope is that inference costs will go down, and while that’s a fairly safe bet, there’s two problems:

Frontier model companies are burning cash so fast, they’ll run out long before economies of scale will make the costs affordable.

Even if the per-token inference costs have gone down, almost every technique (thinking, large context windows, etc) to improve AI performance has involved increasing the number of tokens used. Total query cost is easily outpacing any decrease in per-token inference cost.

Even worse, models themselves are becoming commodities. Although users seem to have preferences for one model over others, there’s still not really a good way to benchmark them. Without a clear ability to differentiate models on performance or ability they’re completely interchangeable, which lowers margins. Why pay more to run company X’s latest and greatest, when company Y’s last generation performs almost identically?

The reason the web was able to cover costs with advertising is because the cost to serve a web page was minimal. A bit of networking gear and a couple servers was all you needed to serve a large website. For many sites, you didn’t even need premium hardware, just a cheap, basic PC with an Internet connection. Lots of people ran free hobby websites with minimal cost. Hell, you can run a website on a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi.

By contrast, AI needs huge GPU clusters to respond to a prompt. A four year old H100 GPU will cost around $30,000; typically 8 of those are clustered together in systems that cost more than $300,000. I can’t even find costs for current generation B100 GPUs or B200 clusters, only cloud rentals. Serving an AI model is orders of magnitude more expensive than serving a website.

providing an essential academic counter-narrative to the rampant demonization of one of fascism’s most ardent enemies.

That seems awfully generous for a man that signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and only became an ardent enemy of the Nazi’s after they backstabbed him. I don’t have the time to energy to dive deeper before saying this sounds like one hell of an apologist for one of history’s most evil authoritarians and I have no desire to engage with it further. This man did not care for his comrades and anyone that equates him with any form of socialism is just poisoning socialism in the general public.

You’re not wrong, but I think you’re really missing something important - that we’ve seen some truly ugly and disturbing shit that we can’t ever unsee. Yes, we’re surrounded by negativity on the Internet, and Mr Rogers advice holds: look for the helpers. That restores some of my faith in mankind, but I can’t ever unhear that kindergarten teacher who was willing to turn in her student’s parents because she suspected they might be here illegally. Could I make small talk with her and feel a little more normal? Sure. Do I think the majority of people are like her? No. But… that knowledge is there, the banality of evil is still alive and lurking.

Steve Shives explains it much more eloquently than I ever could, but I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to devote 15 minutes to a random YouTube video from an internet stranger. I do highly recommend it, as it really encapsulated exactly the kind of sentiment I’m struggling with.

They went from human-derived slop to AI slop years ago. The fact that they looked at that “success” and doubled down is what’s so amazing.

Sean Connery + Mr Bean = Walter Breen?!

MAGA: “We hate DEI because it means they’re not hiring the best people for the job.”

Also MAGA: “Only people loyal to MAGA will get employed.”

You don’t like Edgy Comic Sans?

If we weren’t already boiling the oceans, I’d say that you should continue to use the free tier. A lot. Drive up their costs as much as possible without giving them any revenue by constantly asking it to generate useless crap.

That doesn’t count, it was years ago under former President Truooooooh, yeah.