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Comments (72)

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  Jackobrien
  The giants knew this was coming, and soon 95% of AI tasks will be able to be done by open models (coding, research, cowork style work). So why pay a premium? Why use them at all? This leaves the labs with two options:1) push the frontier in a way only massive scale can, and cash in on it (mythos level cyber security, recursive training, frontier science work). There’s big money for never before possible capabilities.2) own the app layer with their edge in reputation and powered by their infrastructure. Be apple where everyone else is Linux. Do design, coding, research, SMBs, legal, finance, healthcare and more (they are doing all of this).Will it be enough to justify a Google level valuation? We’ll see how fast they can push it.
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  arthurofbabylon
  Let's imagine that Anthropic/OpenAI fail to manufacture scarcity by villainizing Open Weight models (a sincere probability). What is left for these corporations to prop up their prices, or any margin at all? I expect scaffolding around tool use, supporting bespoke implementation and driving risk down for institutional adoption. (They might even build an insurance tool to protect accountants/lawyers from errors in compounded probabilism!)A question for economists... It seems plainly clear to me that information and information processing is commodifying (for the first time in human history?). Without the age-old bottlenecks at the top of the value chain, capital will surely flow downwards, right?
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  linzhangrun
  It would not be surprising if GPT and Claude get cheaper too as inference gets cheaper. Two years ago, o1 was the strongest model and cost much more than Fable, while being nowhere near as smart as a Qwen 3.6 35B that you can now run on a DGX Spark without much trouble.
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  arikrahman
  With cache hit rates being effectively free, harnesses like Reasonix have let me do a month of work for less than 2 dollars. It's not even the subsidies making it cheap, American providers like Digital Ocean or Cloudflare host the same model with similar pricing.
• bmnbmnbmn
  One of the purposes of open weight models is to create a moat. If there were no open models available, I think we'd see much more and better models coming from Europe by now. Right now, any startup wanting to build and sell a model needs to be substantially better than the open models, which has become increasingly difficult and expensive.
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  odie5533
  This is what concerns me about how AI giants are planning to make money. Their product has already been commoditized at prices which for them are still subsidized to grab market share. Unless the giants invent a technological leap, their prices are going to be dragged down by open weight models and I don't see how they'll turn a profit.
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  anax32
  Open weight and local hosting is far, far cheaper. In every respect. Even support is cheaper, over time.However, it's difficult to sell this to businesses who want contracts and KPIs, not staff and commitments.Regulated industries will favour the closed sources, either by choice or mandate. The interesting question is whether they will have better models, or worse models. History says they will receive a worse service, but continue anyway.
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  my-next-account
  I wonder whether Oracle is going to go bankrupt because of this
• leroman
  The token-economics for closed source models are different, they are optimizing for 200 USD tokens worth of software engineer monthly usage, they will increase per token price as models or harnesses are more optimized.
• dist-epoch
  It's so refreshing to read a short to the point article, which is not extruded into 10 pages with LLMs.
• surgical_fire
  One thing it doesn't even mention is how good those models are. Evet since I moved to DeepSeek I had zero regrets. It performs exceptionally well. I honestly prefer it to ChatGPT (or Claude that I use at work).I never used Fable, maybe it is that much better. DeepSeek has no problems with the workloads I give it though - if it only keeps marginally improving with each interaction I don't see myself needing to come back.
• nsoonhui
  [flagged]
• anon
  undefined
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  isoprophlex
  Aren't these open models so cheap because they're (partially) chinese gov. sponsored, and because they're stealing and redistributing the IP that comes in?