First of all I don’t live in a neighbourhood with something equivalent of a HOA, but we do have an organisational unit that involves the group of 6 homes where I live in.
We had a meeting regarding the repair of a shared drain pipe following an inspection we had earlier this year, the camera inspection had a cost of €120 that was equally divided among 6 households, so €20 each, nice and easy.
After getting the quote for the repairs, one of our neighbours asked chatgpt to split the bill, €1500 divided by 6.
edit: paraphrasing, he proudly said "I asked chatgpt and 1500/6 is 250”
Do you really need to ask an LLM to divide two numbers? something the cheapest calculator can do instantly, or better yet, something you can easily do I your head?
I think this is only a valid question because the tech industry has worked so very, very hard to conceal all of the hidden costs of AI.
A question that’s analogous to your original but takes all of the ridiculous costs into account might be something more like “Why drive 20 minutes to the store when you can get there in a helicopter in 5 minutes?”
Like, yeah… one is faster. But speed isn’t the only variable, and there are plenty of obvious reasons why riding a helicopter to go get groceries or whatever is ridiculous. Soon, when AI firms can no longer afford to subsidize their costs, I think people will start to view AI this same way.
Sora at 15 million USD/day burn rate and 3 million USD in yearly revenues buttresses your point. I did see a guy on here (maybe it was a reddit repost or HN repost bot now that I think of it since lemmy hates ai) doing the math and for his plan that was $150 a month or so his compute costs were between $60 and $120 at the published prices for compute hours. His point was also that the big players would have to stop subsidising eventually.
That guy is assuming that the Government won’t bail them out with borrowed tax dollars, which they will. Unless the credit card is already maxxed out, that is happening it’s just a question of when, 37 trillion and counting.
Yeah, the numbers are kind of crazy if you take the time to dig into them. I’m forced to use Claude at work, but the company has bought all of us in at the $200 a month tier. That subscription gives basically unlimited usage… assuming you stay within Claude’s ecosystem (Claude code, basically).
However, if you want to use Claude with some other tools you have to generate an API key, and that gets billed by token usage (on top of the $200 per month). I know devs who are burning through $100 PER DAY on API usage, and I suspect their usage patterns are not at all unusual for heavy users. But even if it is, you’d still only have to be spending $7 a day in compute for the math on a $200 monthly sub to make sense for Anthropic, so it’s pretty obvious that their subscription customers are losing them money at an insane rate.
I’m pretty sure even doubling the subscription costs wouldn’t be enough for them to break even on compute, which is insane given how expensive a monthly sub is already. Once the VC money runs out and a sub price rises to $1000+ per month, the whole landscape is going to change extremely quickly.