Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

wmf·

2026: $1,000/month

2027: $100/month

2028: $10/month

View on HN

Just because the hardware and inference costs may decrease in the future doesn't mean prices will. The AI vendor market is the furthest thing from a competitive industry where there are limited barriers to entry and new market entrants exert downward pressure on prices and profit margins.

Every single company in this market is losing billions on this business, and the only way to make it back is to acquire paying customers at a loss and jack up prices later.

Since Guardian Angel is an inference vendor [1] hopefully they will set sustainable prices from day one so they don't need to increase prices later.

[1] The announcement explains that they can't use APIs for privacy reasons.

They don't control that. Pricing is controlled by the question of when RAM is once again made of semiconductors instead of unobtainium.

Companies aren't losing billions on AI, it is profitable. Currently, industry spend is more than industry revenue because there are massive gains expected from investment into more compute and research, but this isn't an inherent cost of the technology. Consider that OpenAI recently dropped the price of their frontier model by 90% [1].

[1]: https://openai.com/index/advancing-the-price-performance-fro...

RAM:

2024: $315

2025: $780

2026: $1600

Also, price of an Nvidia RTX 4090 according to a random website [1]:

Jan. 2023: $1920

Jan. 2024: $1811

Jan. 2025: $1639

Jan. 2026: $2193

[1] https://bestvaluegpu.com/history/new-and-used-rtx-4090-price...

$1920 in Jan 2023 has the same buying power as $2143 in June 2026

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1%2C920.00&yea...

this is not how it's going to go if OpenAI and Anthropic get their way and the US outlaws use of open-weight models

Hopefully!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com