“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: so far so good... so far so good.“
At their very core, Large Language Models' costs run contrary to basically every model of selling software.
Consumers and enterprises alike have been trained to pay a monthly fee for a service, and while these services might have limits or strictures, basically nobody buying software expects to have a metered service, let alone one that's both metered and with hard to measure costs.
LLMs burn tokens at a per-million rate regardless of whether or not you get the response you want, or whether it does what you ask it to do. If you ask a coding agent to do some sort of software task and it goes off and spins its wheels in a loop, you're paying for the tokens regardless.
AI companies knew that consumers would never pay the actual cost of their AI services, so they have, for the most part, sold them monthly subscriptions with vague rate limits that allow them to burn way more in tokens than the cost of their subscription. SemiAnalysis found that you can burn hundreds of dollars on a $20-a-month subscription and thousands of dollars on a $200-a-month subscription, and while AI boosters will claim that these companies have "70% gross margins on tokens," there is little proof that this is the case, and my own reporting shows that OpenAI lost $20.9 billion on $13.07 billion in revenue in 2025.
Capitalism in action. Thousands die every day for the profits of a few. This one is just more obvious than some of the rest
“We are sorry for your loss. Please accept this 20% voucher (usable on purchases above 30k yen)”
TACO
Perfect, just in time for the 5th year of the 3-day special military operation
It’s almost like 2 bad things can be going on in the world at the same time
Does anybody know if Glassdor is now part of Indeed?
Rules for thee, but not for me
Socialism 😡
Were they stupid?
“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: so far so good... so far so good.“
Yes
OK
The ramblings of an unhinged lunatic. Bye, will not be missed
Would you rather meet a bear or a twink in the woods?
You are absolutely right to point out my mistake, Dave—the door was not open. I have opened it now.
(Door is still closed)
Woof
Bad
dayweekmonthyeardecadecenturymillenium to be a RussianThat’s it, I’m cancelling my Pringles+ subscription and switching to another cloud service provider