This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm sorry, did everybody else not see this coming from miles away? This is the private equity playbook.
When something is too good to be true, you ALWAYS have to be ready to either jump ship, massively change how you do things, or pay through the nose.
Pretty sure they picked the wrong tech to try and lock people into. It isn't hardware and doesn't have some kind of proprietary interface that takes time to get used to when switching. Some models might be better than others at specific things, but not enough to justify the prices they are going to charge for output you have to review and fix.
This is literally the easiest thing to jump ship from.
That's the stupidest thing about these AI companies' valuation.
They don't even really own anything!
Their models -- their main proprietary IP -- are not copyrightable or patentable, and not legally protected in any way. Any competitor can copy them at any time and then offer the same service for cheaper, without the overhead costs for training. The giants of the AI industry could easily be undercut and replaced at any time.
The hardest part about the copying is the actual copying without having access to the weights or even just a ready to run file for the model.
IIRC Deepseek kinda did something like that by asking ChatGPT tons of questions to train their own model or something
Yeah, you can do that ... or some good old fashioned corporate espionage.
Or, hell, just ask ChatGPT for its weights model. With how shitty these AI companies are at security and guardrails, that might just work.
All of them also bring their own comfortable export feature.
"I want to share all of this with my team. Create the prompt that is necessary to do this"
The unique thing about GitHub Copilot (and all the other vibe-coding tools) is that they're speed-running the playbook because this shit is not profitable. It can't be. Their costs scale up with usage, unlike every other business that can take advantage of economies of scale, so they've skipped the slow, steady enshittification phase and jumped directly into the "squeeze blood from this stone to keep the scam going a little longer" phase.
Good sign that it may be over soon.
Absolutely 100% do not count on it
I've been preaching this for the past couple of years. Everything up until now has been entirely about gaining market share, and AI will never be cheaper than it is right now, and it's not cheap.
Just look at the "earnings" for companies like openAI. They are 1000+% in the red. It's impossible for them to change their sales model enough to make that profitable. As more data centers go up, the operating costs are also going to go up.
I've been telling people that now is the best time in the past decade or more to learn how to code. There will be positions available in the coming years when the only junior devs available are vibe coders.
I remember having to sit down my boss and explain how it can only become more expensive over time. It’s the big tech playbook after all. Didn‘t matter. I‘m told again and again how AI is only becoming stronger and cheaper. Especially during salary negotiations. Nasty stuff. They know I know it‘s BS and they still cling to this nonsensical narrative because it would be very beneficial to them and very bad for me.
Open weight LLMs are actually pretty cheap because there are competing providers. But something tells me your boss isn't using openrouter to find the best price per million tokens lol
Yeah - people are talking about replacing jobs with AI. As if it is not totally obvious that people like Sam Altman will totally bleed you dry after you fired all your workers. You will not save on your wage bill, you will simply give the money to Sam Altman
Wages are treated as an immediate operational cost, while AI is framed as a capital investment. This accounting distinction makes AI look like a long-term asset, whereas labor remains perpetually categorized as an expense.
Only if you are running your own servers. You dont get to depreciate a SaaS subscription or metered bill.
The crazy thing is, this isn't really a "squeeze" in the traditional sense. The problem was that every single mainstream AI product has been heavily subsidized....because it's wildly expensive and not even close to being profitable.
That sort of subsidization was only going to last for so long. The dam is starting to crack. People aren't ready to pay what AI truly costs.
The strategy is always to gain a monopoly or near monopoly on a market before pushing for the enshittification of the product to reduce costs and maximize profits, once customers have become dependent on said product, then pray that most choose the path of least resistance which is staying and dealing with the worse and more expensive version of what they're used to rather than retraining or restarting from zero elsewhere.
Capitalism 101.
It's not even just private equity, this is more or less the exact strategy Microsoft uses.
Oops. Now that users are being to made to pay something closer to the true cost of AI inference, no one will like using it anymore. Could this be what ultimately sets off the bubble *collapse?
Users are paying way more than the cost of inference. Look up inference prices of high end open weight models vs claude or gpt. Cheaper by an order of magnitude.
It's the constant training of new models that's losing them money. New version is out every month.
To clarify, AI companies charging the cost that would make the inference profitable for them, against the operating costs and financing costs on new capital expenditures (new data centres, new compute and new model training*), is more than what most people appear to be willing to pay. That cost is indeed more than just the cost of inference incurred by the AI company.
*(I'm being generous and including model training as capex for the sake of argument, even if I personally think to continue the hypetrain, continuous model improvements are core to AI companies' operation.)
The 2 remaining devs using Copilot will leave it.
It's rare to see such a clear example of first-mover disadvantage as GitHub Copilot.
The company I work for had a pilot project for a while but recently they opened up for all users to order Github Copilot. Of course it is Github Copilot since everything else at the company is from Microsoft.
Joke's on them, I never used it.
You mean you guys don't rotate between 10 free accounts and use their monthly quotas?
That many free accounts is against their user agreement though hehe
What are they gonna do, close your accounts and make you sign up for 10 more? lol
"For basically nothing'... If it's basically nothing then use your damn brain to do it.
The slop is now prohibitively expensive. Good.
Every single person who mentions using AI for anything- any reason at all- all I can do is imagine what face they would make if I spat in it.
I was still using my copilot account, figured I’d see how the new pricing worked. I blew through 60% of my max+ limit in 1 day on absurdly light usage, promptly cancelled rather than upgrade from the $39 / month plan to the $100 /month plan.
I do think there’s a productivity help from AI but vibe coding everything is miserable and gives awful results. Targeted AI usage makes sense and I’ll refine my local AI usage and tooling for that.
What I want to know, is that are they just charging closer to the real cost or the actual real cost.
Chances are they would want to slowly increase the price à la boiling frog method.
And once that happens, then they have to increase it again to make profit, AND that has to measure up against regular ways of making money so it can’t just be barely profitable.
It’s a long road ahead for them
Local AI it is then. Not that I'm using all that much now anyway...
Where I work, Chinese models are banned due to legal concerns. Not just in production, on any company-owned machine. That basically eliminates all the decent open weight models. I’m imagining this type of policy will be more widespread. Because of the potential for legal woes if systems and people are dependent on these models and then federal or state laws impose harsh penalties with little time to react.
Codeberg accounts incoming!
I don't think they're moving from GitHub, just GitHub CoPilot.
they should probably move away from plagiarismhub
between anthropic going ipo for cash and this, I think we're seeing the edge of the bubble
Single prompt takes 25% of the monthly usage in like 30 seconds even though I have Pro haha
They'll move to another service, the service's expenses will spike, and then that service will switch to usage based billing, and then they'll have to look for another service again, and repeat the loop until they can run a good enough model locally.
Another thing that greatly improves productivity is not relying solely on AI to do your job for you.
Why would anyone use Copilot when you have so many other options. Cursor just released Composer 2.5 and it's actually decent. I should have a job right now doing this.
