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Comment by mr_00ff00 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know if this is ridiculous, but I’m curious if access to LLMs will one day be priced like the Bloomberg Terminal or something. Where access for one user is like 20,000 dollars. Maybe less than that, but like 5k per person.

Seems crazy by most software standards, but when Bloomberg became a software only program (they stopped selling physical terminals) and people were shocked when they paid almost nothing for excel but then so much for the second tool they needed as traders.

Yet it still is priced so high and people pay.

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The difference is that Bloomberg Terminals were always expensive, and so people expected to pay. LLMs are basically free (subsidized) at this point, and people are very sensitive to large price increases.

Sure and I’m sure there would be a huge shock, but simple economics would dictate that if that’s the true equilibrium of price for LLMs to be economical, then it would have to get to the price eventually

There's good quality LLMs you can run for free today, so no.

The trend is going the opposite way, intelligence too cheap to meter according to @sama.

I think that's exactly what will happen but with robots.

A robot the cooks, cleans, and talks to you.

Many won't afford it so they'll maybe rent one by the day or for X number of hours.

Simple.

1. Is it worth 20k to anyone? Well depends on the advantage but maybe yes. People are dropping 200-1000 a month already as ordinary devs.

2. Is there competition? Yes lots. To get to 20k one model provider needs a real killer edge that no one else can keep up. Or alternatively constraints push prices up (like memory!) but then that is not margin anymore.

I think there could be a few directions. Consumer level LLM usage will become free. Corporate-grade LLM use will cost a lot of money. Maybe the highest grade LLM use will be regulated and only done through government labs.

What’s a high grade LLM though in such a competitive environment? And if China releases more high grade open source models, that pricing model is f8cked.

One interesting thing I heard someone say about LLM’s is this could be a people’s innovation, basically something so low margin it actually provides more value to “the people” than billionaires.

It just seems hard to imagine that simultaneously running 1,000 instances of claude code will be cheap in the next decade, but maybe running 1,000 instances of claude-like tools is what a corporate LLM subscription will give. And maybe running 1,000,000 or a billion such models is what the government will do once a contract gets awarded.

Just random speculation though.

It's my understanding that even the paid version ChatGPT is highly subsidized so yeah, the prices will have to be raised quite substantially to meet profitability.

that $18,000-$24,000 bloomberg terminal had a 300bps modem

it took longer to generate a page of content or get a complete answer than a free LLM takes on an i5 CPU.

(ex: llamaGPTJ for linux CLI)

its missing live market data and news but incorporating that with something akin to openrouter would be trivial.

chinese open source models disagree with you

They're not going to open source forever. Industry will consolidate. The Chinese winners will stop open sourcing their best models in the future.

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