Fuck AI

Problem is there is tons of competition and anyone with a video card can run models on their PC for the cost of electricity.

EEE all over again.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/05/18/github-copilot-ai-token-charges-to-go-up-10x-100x/
https://x.com/Sugar_develop/status/2054323790327492851
https://x.com/abebeos/status/2054445525030654461
https://x.com/wogikaze/status/2054365603994255639
https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1tbfkui/ill_just_leave_this_here/

The whole point of cloud was that renting wholesale infrastructure is cheaper and less hassle than building your own.

There's no way anything but a sliver of dependent companies are capable of hosting to their needs.

But I think it’s more likely they’ll just switch to free, self-hosted AI models.

Implying anyone left there will even have the know-how to set one up

Still not “free” even if self-hosted and I would think perf and accuracy would be noticeably worse.

My company started using AI in coding process a lot more now but its only because the AI responses are useful 80% of the time. If its lower than that, not worth the time to use for most tasks.

Chinese model labs are still doing token (monthly) bundles, too. Core problem is that bundles only work when most people don't use up the limit. US models have high cash burn and low margins even at high token prices.

Not to mention China could subsidise them just to pressure the US companies even more.

I wonder if they are timing it for the price increase to let them stick to the promotions that cost them more before pulling the rug. Could even be a win to open source them if the US government tries to block it.

You missed on a lot with a pet rock, my daughter discovered them just a few years ago and was completely in heaven from the idea. Perhaps, the similar with AI?

Man, comparing AI to a pet rock is crazy delusional.

According to Ed Zitron, AWS cost about $52 billion between 2003 and 2017 (adjusted for inflation), and became profitable after that. OpenAI did 13 funding rounds at a total of $180 billion and the signs are that they are burning through that capital at an accelerated pace and nowhere near profitable. The scale isn't quite the same

https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-ai-isnt-too-big-to-fail/

Adding more context to what phcorcoran said, AWS was something that actually had an "end goal". A new company offering cloud servers where you can host your stuff to be reached by the internet at large, which was already a proven necessity even back in 2003.

AI is still trying to sell itself as something useful. Not only that, the fixed monthly cost makes zero sense, because tokens have an actual monetary value - there is a cost in processing, cooling, network, etc, which can be attached to it. You'd need an army of low-usage users to pay for the power users^[you know those f2p games where the players who use their credit cards are above all others? The free players' value is in being the punching bag of the paying players. Now imagine the reverse: you need to recruit 20 paying players, who are ok to take a beating, to keep one unprofitable whale in the game. It makes no business sense, but it's exactly what's going on at the moment with their monthly rates. It's no wonder every other week, AI users are reaching their monthly limit faster and faster] to have it make any sense. The alternative is actually charging per token, like pay 10 dollars and get 1k tokens or whatever.

Yup. And vendor lock in? As soon as prices go up, people will realize they can use Zed, Continue.dev, OpenWebUI, or any other FOSS system and point them at Claude or OpenAI or whatever APIs, lock in won't matter.

I feel for the employees whose lives will be tumulted by their moronic management who went “all in”

Money is 100% wasted on the rich.

They've literally never had this much more, proportionally. If this isn't too much, there's no such thing.

How do you enshittify shit?

it started shit.

Microsoft has already raised prices with their Github Copilot service. In some cases the new price is 27x higher. And the actually useful models are only available in the super expensive plan (and then also incur high fees for actually using it).

Apparently that post is gone?