YHK - yet another hacker news clone

OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?

35 points minimaxir 1 hour ago 44 comments

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

I fully expect token vendors to go the way of mobile data providers. Increasing throughput and efficiency, yet commoditized and not reaping the massive rewards of the economic gains their technologies enable.

Can't wait for the unlimited plans we will have in due time.

Iolaum 1 hour ago | parent

They will not come. You can only spend so much time speaking on the phone.

But if you get unlimited tokens, with scheduled/automated jobs and subagents you will burn a LOT of money.

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

Mobile video data and tethered devices would tell a different story. Usage growth has been significant.

I expect they will be "unlimited" in the same sense the mobile / ISPs do that 99% of people never reach the limits.

We could have "unlimited" electricity too, if we choose, by printing solar panels (like the Chinese) and hopefully fusion before long.

ModernMech 1 hour ago | parent

> You can only spend so much time speaking on the phone.

Tell that to my dial up modem as I played Active Worlds in 1996.

boredatoms 51 minutes ago | parent

Yeu were still limited to about 4GiB/month usage as a time/bandwidth ceiling

Skunkleton 55 minutes ago | parent

"Unlimited" for a consumer will probably take a form like limited parallel agents at max intelligence for X amount of tokens, followed by either single threaded agents or nerfed intelligence or both.

This is the same mechanism used in unlimited mobile internet for example.

cicko 35 minutes ago | parent

I rarely use more than 25% of my subscription's weekly allowance. So, it's already unlimited.

JumpCrisscross 53 minutes ago | parent

> if you get unlimited tokens, with scheduled/automated jobs and subagents you will burn a LOT of money

Maybe, maybe not. There could be a saturation point of compute demand from ordinary consumers. (See: hot-water analogy.)

bikvfeee 51 minutes ago | parent

> Can't wait for the unlimited plans we will have in due time.

I don't see how this can happen. The cost of serving a model grows linearly with use (energy). The cost of serving a mobile data plan is approximately zero.

criemen 18 minutes ago | parent

I'm curious, why would this not turn into an unlimited electricity flatrate? In most parts of the world, consumer electricity is charged by kWh, not as flat payment.

As long as tokens are as energy intense to compute as they are right now, I don't see a flatrate being a viable model.

pixl97 11 minutes ago | parent

Power and memory are apt to become the biggest billing constraints.

verdverm 6 minutes ago | parent

Something close to how we rent other cloud resources today makes sense. We don't worry about electricity costs, it's built into the hourly prices, use as much of the hardware as you can. Electricity rates vary over the course of the day as well.

People don't like complex pricing. This would be for businesses running larger workloads. For individuals, the unlimited plan seems the most probable to me. This stuff is going to get real cheap in the coming years.

buckleyourshoe 59 minutes ago | parent

Competition drives prices down. We tried Kimi and GLM models after hitting 'cybersecurity' blocks on OpenAI and Anthropic. We found them to be much cheaper to access and helped us complete our work without 'cybersecurity' refusals blocking us.

soupfordummies 33 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn’t be surprised if US “bans” access to the Chinese models by the end of the year

bethekidyouwant 32 minutes ago | parent

How?

ApolloFortyNine 26 minutes ago | parent

If you are a legally operating company in the US just saying it's banned is enough, the threat of enforcement is enough pressure.

You and I obviously can just use a VPN, but 99% of usage is likely as part of a company.

xscott 15 minutes ago | parent

Presumably, legally operating companies aren't the dominant threat though. So banning open weight models doesn't solve anything.

xscott 17 minutes ago | parent

I think your question is rhetorical, in which case I agree with the sentiment.

The US absolutely could (and very well might) make Chinese models illegal, possibly open weight models in general, but all that will do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding US citizens.

Law breakers in the US and the entire rest of the world would still have access, and nothing in the US will be any safer. People who think regulation will solve the problem should be embarrassed by their ignorance.

aktenlage 13 minutes ago | parent

It may solve the problem of anthropic and open ai going out of business with all major consequences that would have for the rest of the US.

xscott 7 minutes ago | parent

Lol, that's a good point, but I'm not thrilled with a choice between bubble popping or mandated duopoly.

jonathanstrange 8 minutes ago | parent

Banning open weight models in the US would provide the rest of the world with a huge business advantage since these models are much more cost-effective than US models.

rcstank 26 minutes ago | parent

What harness are you all using? OpenCode?

mr_mitm 22 minutes ago | parent

I found Claude Code to work best. You can use it with any compatible API.

gum_wobble 59 minutes ago | parent

Because they have found a way that cost them less to have you use a lesser capable model o less expensive

hauntingseaweed 49 minutes ago | parent

Price war. Duh. There is no moat. Also them chinese competition. It’s going to be race to the bottom. It’s gonna be ugly for the stock market. Good for consumers though!

SugarReflex 46 minutes ago | parent

Can they do the same thing with fuel prices?

dwattttt 44 minutes ago | parent

If you make it easy for lots of people to make the fuel, yes. EVs and smaller scale power generation anyone?

YetAnotherNick 43 minutes ago | parent

Yes if China somehow gets the fuel and subsidize it to sell it for cheaper in the global world, even the gulf state price will go down.

dymk 37 minutes ago | parent

Solar panels (which continue get cheaper every year) on my house makes charging my low-TCO EV free in 5 years

3eb7988a1663 45 minutes ago | parent

Just wait until the government ban on the dangerous open models materializes.

pixl97 12 minutes ago | parent

Not just models, won't be long before hardware is regulated too.

Kuyawa 33 minutes ago | parent

Duh, China?

bhu8 31 minutes ago | parent

It’s probably more efficient caching methods and smaller models (6 sol is actually 6 terra and opus 5.5 is smaller than 5.1 etc). Don’t overthink this please

chakintosh 30 minutes ago | parent

It’s a race to the bottom to see who blinks first and goes bankrupt. It’s not sustainable.

trollbridge 17 minutes ago | parent

Is it? DeepSeek has already proved they’re selling inference at a profit.

deadbabe 23 minutes ago | parent

People think OpenAI and Anthropic are just these wildly unprofitable companies with no future or business.

They know what they’re doing. The naysayers are like the people that said this little internet thing wasn’t going anywhere.

shooly 16 minutes ago | parent

It sounds like you're just a "yessayer", though? Not much different from naysayers, just on the opposite side.

One thing that naysayers have going on for them is the fact that those companies indeed aren't making profit right now.

lhd1 10 minutes ago | parent

Whether you think they have a future or not does not change fact that they currently are wildly unprofitable.

>internet thing wasn’t going anywhere.

This is conflating the utility of the technology with the economics behind it. Few people claim LLMs are useless. It's a question of figuring out a viable business model.

prjkt 20 minutes ago | parent

They're competing with NVIDIA (huggingface)

Starlevel004 18 minutes ago | parent

> It turned out that GPT-6 Sol was a dud performancewise, so a week later OpenAI announced GPT-6.1 Sol,

I strongly believe that GPT-6 Sol was only ever meant to be the web chat model, but it was a panic public release to respond to Opus 5.5. It's clearly been over fitted for drawing diagrams in the chat.

dez11de 16 minutes ago | parent

Moore’s Law.

redrix 12 minutes ago | parent

This is why Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing for more “regulation”. You can’t show ROI to investors by cutting inference costs.

Regulation might inconvenience them a little, but the upside is huge if it means open models out of China get banned.