AI Subscriptions Are Dead | Hacker News Reader

AI Subscriptions Are Dead

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6 pointstwapi6 comments

I was thinking this recently, but I'm not so sure anymore.

1. Open weight models are going to wreck the underlying financials, they will drive commoditization.

2. Mobile data used to be expensive, now we all have unlimited plans. It is a usage/cost commodity as well.

3. While the Big Ai subscriptions end, a new generation of open weight subscriptions are just warming up.

I dont think open weight models are going to be a big disrupter. At even a small scale you need a machine with 8 gpus just to run the larger models that still arent that close to SOTA. A machine like that is half a million per year. You might need a second machine for your dev environment or do fine tuning. Then you will need to hire an AI engineer who know who to tune the model. You'll probably need k8s and Dynamo expert to run infra to do the inference.

It all gets very expensive, very quickly. Sure some customers will pay this, but many, many more are just going to pay per token. It's the same model that made the hyper-scalers like AWS into giant cash cows. Only this time, tokens can be sold to both enterprises and grandma. Grandma never bought AWS, which means the market for convenient tokens is huge.

It'll get to point to where good enough for average user models will be able to be ran on common hardware. Agentic platforms are already moving towards smaller ,more efficient, and faster targeted models per agent/task/tool. Takes a bit more to setup but works great.

All your general knowledge frontier models are just going to be baked into every OS and browser. Coding is almost to point of being viable for self host.. I think the only real use for high end paid models is gonna be kinda like things now... high end scientific workloads.. professional rendering.. especially 3d and video, financials, etc.

A $4,000 mac can take you pretty far right now.. and we have the upcoming dgx hitting mainstream consumers. Give it another couple years. It's changing fast.

As we look out further, local Ai will become even better. I run a DGX Spark with qwen36moe and it is between gemini-2.5 & gemini-3 capabilities. It uses around the same electricity as an incandescent light bulb, no water, token freedom.

I’m not sure the parent comment is talking about running the open weight models on your own hardware

> 3. This is the beginning of the wealth gap expansion. Those that can afford to spend $10,000 a month on Fable 5 will build incredible products that eat up more and more of the economy. Those that can’t afford Fable 5 will have an insane disadvantage

Jensen Huang, is that you?

> 4. The government will need to step in eventually. There will be too much civil unrest. I hope the answer isn’t free money. That won’t do anything. I hope the answer is education/access to AI resources for ALL. Universal Basic Opportunity

> 5. You need to seriously reconsider where your money goes every month. If you are complaining about AI prices and in the back of your mind you know your skill set is becoming quickly irrelevant, all while spending money every month on Netflix, Xbox Live, Paramount +, drugs, DoorDash, Uber, and other things that bring nothing positive to your life, you are simply doing it wrong. AI is an investment in yourself. It’s an investment in your relevance to the global economy. You need to make sure you make that investment

Transportation? Entertainment? Waste of money. Buy some tokens.

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