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Comment by layoric | Hacker News Reader

> how any of these companies remain sustainable

They don't, they have a big bag of money they are burning through, and working to raise more. Anthropic is in a better position cause they don't have the majority of the public using their free-tier. But, AFAICT, none of the big players are profitable, some might get there, but likely through verticals rather than just model access.

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If your house is on fire, the fact that the village are throwing firewood through the windows doesn't really mean the house will stay standing longer.

Doesn’t this mean that realistically even if “the bubble never pops”, at some point money will run dry?

Or do these people just bet on the post money world of AI?

The money won’t run dry. They’ll just stop providing a free plan when the marginal benefits of having one don’t outweigh the costs any more.

In two years time you'll need to add an 10% Environmental Tax, 25% Displaced Workers Tax, and 50% tip to your OpenAI bills.

Or at that point, maybe stop using it and just let them go broke?

It's more likely that the free tier model will be a distilled lower parameter count model that will be cheap enough to run.

They will likely just charge a lot more money for these services. Eg, the $200+ per months I think could become more of the entry level in 3-5 years. Saying that smaller models are getting very good, so there could be low margin direct model services and expensive verticals IMO.

At that price it would start to be worth it to set up your own hardware and run local open source models

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