I predict that costs will grow to 80% of what it would cost a human, across the board for everything AI can do.
"It's still cheaper than a human" they'll say. Loudly here on HN too.
Of course this will happen slowly, very slowly. Lets meet again in 10-20 years.
Nobody will successfully lobby for banning local models either, it just isn’t going to happen when the rest of the world will happily avoid paying 80% of their profits to some US bigco for the privilege of existing.
The question is how much friction there will be for people to switch over to Gemini, GPT or maybe even DeepSeek or Mistral or whatever. Even if price hikes are inevitable across the board, the moat any single org has is somewhat limited, so prices definitely will be a factor they'll compete on with one another at least a bit.
I disagree. The models are going to become commodities (we're already almost there), but the tooling and integrations will be the moat. Reproducing everything Anthropic has already built with Claude Code, Cowork, and all their connectors would be nontrivial, and they're just getting started.
Anyone can implement an AI chatbot. But few will be able to provide AI that's deeply integrated into our daily lives.
They're one org with presumably some specific direction. As the actual models get better, expect a large part of the dev community iterating on tools way more easily, sometimes ones that Anthropic doesn't quite have an equivalent to - for example, just recently Cline released their Kanban solution to dish out tasks to agents (https://cline.bot/kanban), OpenCode has been around for a while for the agentic stuff (https://opencode.ai/) and now has a desktop and web version as well, alongside dozens of others. Cline and KiloCode also have decent browser automation.
I will admit that everyone working on everything at the same time definitely means limitless reinvention of the wheel and some genuinely good initiatives dying off along the way (I personally liked RooCode more than both the Cline and KiloCode for Visual Studio Code, sad to see them go), but I doubt we're gonna see a lack of software. Maybe a lack of good software, though; not like Anthropic or any org has any moat there either, since they're under the additional pressure of having to do a shitload of PR and release new models and keep up appearances, compared to your average dev just pushing to GitHub (unless they want corporate money, in which case they do need some polish).
80% of a human's price varies greatly by region. 80% of the lowest-priced effort-of- humans in this space right now will probably not be sustainable for the sellers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-c...
But that's a bad example, price discrimination for commodities is generally not legal, while discrimination for services is. Data is arguably a commodity (ianal, I'm not up to date on the law of this). "Tokens" are not.
In fact the law makes carve outs specifically for businesses that sell services to discriminate on price based exactly on how the service is used and by who. And they do it all the time.
Whether it's fair or not, up to you to decide as a consumer. If you don't like it don't pay for it.
(I am not a full-time wedding photographer, but have shot maybe 20 weddings, and heard of this multiple times.)
It’s a way less transformational technology when put in context of the real price tag.
Seems most of the open weight models are from outside the USA (shocker), going to be interesting to see how THAT shakes out.
This doesn't even have anything to do with if it loses money or not. Obviously they are going to charge as much as possible.