Is the assumption here that inference costs will stay roughly static, or that frontier models will keep getting more expensive quickly enough to offset efficiency gains?
Because I don’t think “the subsidization train is going to end” necessarily means current pricing becomes impossible.
If capital keeps pouring into frontier AI, companies still have an incentive to subsidize access while competing for users and market share. And if that subsidization starts drying up, there’s even more incentive to bring inference costs down by making smaller and cheaper models catch up to today’s frontier capabilities.
So either way, I’m not sure you can extrapolate from the cost of serving current frontier models to what equivalent capability will cost two years from now.
Because I don’t think “the subsidization train is going to end” necessarily means current pricing becomes impossible.
If capital keeps pouring into frontier AI, companies still have an incentive to subsidize access while competing for users and market share. And if that subsidization starts drying up, there’s even more incentive to bring inference costs down by making smaller and cheaper models catch up to today’s frontier capabilities.
So either way, I’m not sure you can extrapolate from the cost of serving current frontier models to what equivalent capability will cost two years from now.