But Micheals arguments are valid. There could be competition, or even local models, thus indeed becoming 'commoditized'.
Because I used frontier models this weekend (I had 78% of my assigned tokens for this month left, I wanted to burn them before June 1st, ended up with 24% left), and tbh, I don't see much of the improvement compared to the models I use day-to-day. I'd rather pay less for a slightly worse model. Stacktrace analysis (or any bug analysis really) is where LLMs have the most success rate imho, and free models are good enough since last year. As for coding/architecture tasks, frontier models seems to hallucinate less, but I wonder if it's the guardrails or the he model themselves.
EDIT: i still find absurd thinking that all those subscription would go to a single company, let me be clear. But that $50 price doesn't sound unreasonable at all.
Anthropic and OpenAI are losing lots of money with their subscriptions. They are giving away access to those powerful models for cheap. The Deepseek price is the API price, which is the only sustainable approach here
The problem with all these companies is that they are priced as if their training and inference costs are going to come way down, but somehow only for them specifically.