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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I am still not willing to upgrade to a Pro account. I pay $20 a month for both Gemini and ChatGPT, and for what I need this is currently enough.

I have dreamed of having powerful AI ever since I read Bertram Raphael's great book Mind Inside Matter around 1978, getting hooked on AI research and sometimes practical applications for my life since then.

I can easily afford $200 for a Pro account but I get this nagging feeling that LLMs are not the final path to the powerful AI I have always dreamed of and I don't want to support this level of hype.

I have lived through a few AI winters and I worry that accountants will tally up the costs, environmental and money, versus the benefits and that we collectively have an 'oh shit' moment.

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LLMs would be transformative technology if all progress stopped today if only for their NLP capabilities, but the recent models obviously do so much more than that. Winter isn’t coming in that regard; what might happen if models won’t get smarter from here is a race to the bottom in token prices, which would still be not bad at all for token buyers.

Agreed. I've said exactly the same thing before. If GPT-4 from two years ago had turned out to be the endgame of LLM technology, and we collectively spent the following 20 years integrating those capabilities throughout the economy, even that would be a profound change to the world as we know it.

If we froze LLM technology at present-day capabilities and spent the next 20 years on that, I'd expect it to ultimately look transformative in a similar way to the Internet. I mean if you told me in fall 2022 that 2.5 years later I'd be building software by meta-prompting and meta-meta-prompting AI agents to write code overnight while I slept, I'd assume that we were fictional characters in a Black Mirror episode.

I have trouble justifying the $20 tier when compared to other offers for similar service from other providers. I think OpenAI should, every once in a while, offer a new feature with no delay to their Plus tier, with lots of limits of course.

You don't need a Pro account. I'm on the free tier and I'm paying for o3-pro via the API. I spent just $3.70 in credits yesterday to compare it against Claude 4 Opus.

what do you use as a client? Most open source clients don't seem to support the new endpoint that o3-pro requires.

I was using the OpenAI Codex CLI

Can you expand any more on the nagging feeling?

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