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The Time Bomb Went Off: AI's All-You-Can-Eat Era Just Ended in Real Time (www.thestateofbrand.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Excerpt:

The IPO Math Forces the Issue

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are on IPO timelines for the second half of 2026. OpenAI completed the largest private funding round in history in April, $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation. Anthropic has reportedly surpassed $30 billion in annualized revenue. Massive numbers, both of them. Also both attached to companies that are still burning cash at extraordinary rates.

Public markets will not tolerate the gap between subscription revenue and compute cost that has defined the past three years. The moment either company files, analysts will demand unit economics that show a path to margin. Usage-based billing is the fastest way to demonstrate that path.

None of this contradicts the repricing thesis. The pricing war is the last land grab before the gate closes. Both companies are spending aggressively now to lock in users whose switching costs will make them sticky when prices rise. OpenAI offers two months free. Anthropic offers 50% more capacity. Both expire in July. What comes after July is the real pricing.

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[–] 41 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

How does this work when “good enough” AI like Deepseek V4, GLM and such are so dirt cheap they’re basically free for businesses? And available from tons of providers, or even self hostable?

And that’s only going to get exponentially more dramatic. Bitnet models + nonlinear attention + ASICs alone is at least an order of magnitude cost drop, though there’s tons of lower hanging fruit to pick.

AI is a race to the bottom, not the top. Intelligence has basically topped out, efficiency has not. It’s never going to replace most workers, but just assist them or automate dumb tasks, increasingly cheaply.

And Tech Bros can’t make trillions off of that.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    How does this work when “good enough” AI like Deepseek V4, GLM and such are so dirt cheap they’re basically free for businesses? And available from tons of providers, or even self hostable?

    Typically what separates enterprise-grade products and services from alternatives is a contract with an SLA... but that generally means there's some contractual requirements for the reliability and productivity of the product or service. I'm not sure that any of the overhyped chatbots are reliable enough to support such contractual obligations, or that there's a useful way to measure their productivity.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

    contract with an SLA

    Plenty of hosters provide that. Cerebras, for example, fabs their own ASICs (seperate from Nvidia), builds them into servers, hosts a number of open-weights models themselves in friendly jurisdictions, and offers SLAs for enterprise clients; it doesn't get more "guaranteed" than that in AI Land, but there are tons of hosts to choose from.

    https://www.cerebras.ai/build-with-us

    The major sticking point is that the best open weights models are Chinese. This doesn't actually matter from a security standpoint anymore than buying a Chinese tire does; they're dumb weights anyone can finetune, host and run on whatever software/hardware stack one wants... But try explaining that technical distinction of "using Chinese AI" to executives responsible for entire corporations.

    There are even attempts to "launder" Chinese models to make them palatable for western enterprise use. For example:

    https://huggingface.co/microsoft/MAI-DS-R1

    https://huggingface.co/unsloth/r1-1776

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Plenty of hosters provide that. Cerebras, for example, fabs their own ASICs (seperate from Nvidia), builds them into servers, hosts a number of open-weights models themselves in friendly jurisdictions, and offers SLAs for enterprise clients; it doesn’t get more “guaranteed” than that in AI Land, but there are tons of hosts to choose from.

    This makes sense for first-party hardware businesses like Cerebras that are renting or selling their platform to developer businesses (second party) for the purpose of creating AI-based software tools which they will then sell as services to other businesses (third party), and I can see that guarantees could be written in a contract for the first-to-second-party relationship.

    What I don't see is that any such guarantees can be effectively written or enforced in a second-to-third-party contract, where an AI SaaS company is selling their software service to companies that don't do their own development, and expect that the service they have contracted will produce reliable results.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago*

    Actually, what Cerebra’s does is no different than any generic host. They provide API access to LLM weights, though most providers will do it with some standard open source serving software like VLLM or SGLang.

    And they all use the same open weights LLMs. They arent the software developer.

    Cerebras doesn’t train their own model. And I think this is fine for service guarantees as long as the weights do not change, hence will provide the exact same deterministic results at zero temperature (and generally perform the same when used as a service).

    My experience is that a lot of “enterprise” LLM stuff is used in bulk, for results that can be “good enough” with a reasonable error rate. Like (for example) extracting info from literally millions of documents. Or as RAG/querying their own internal documentation.

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