this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
506 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
85242 readers
4023 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Here's the problem... He says AI was adopted beyond his expectations. Great.
But if somebody is using it at the current price point of super cheap or free, are they going to keep using it when it gets expensive?
You can make a basic chatbot run on a desktop PC, but nobody wants to pay for that. Once you get into things with useful generation and large context windows, or things like video generation, suddenly you need one or more $10,000+ pieces of hardware to run it. So the $10 a month you charge the user is basically an introductory price that doesn't cover your hardware fees let alone the software engineers to build your AI.
Eventually, the bill comes due. Eventually, you have to look at your customers and how much machine time they use each month and how much your r&d costs and figure out what the actual cost to the customer has to be. And then the customer rethinks how useful the AI is or isn't.
People will pay $10 a month for chat GPT to write their emails. Will they pay $100 a month?
What about the company that replaced all their software developers with AI. Suddenly the AI cost as much or more as the software developers. Only now the developers who understood the code base work for other companies.
There will be a fun correction when this happens.
On the code development front it's even worse as now you have an unpredictable cost based on token consumption rather than the predictable cost of a salary and have no leverage to negotiate the cost.
Quite true. Switching providers is an apples to oranges comparison, so it's not like you can just switch from Claude to Gemini and expect everything to work perfectly.