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Comment by edg5000 | Hacker News Reader

We can use OpenRouter pricing to get an idea about what competitive inference pricing is like without R&D or other costs, and indeed we'd be screwed if we had to pay those rates. We'd go from 100-200 USD to 2000-4000 USD/m.

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Not sure what you're talking about here. Kimi K3 is frontier scale and sells competitively at $2.80 input, $14 output per 1M tokens.

edit: oh you mean month? Sure, but then it fully depends on your usecase. I agree that subscriptions are heavily subsidized though.

Bear in mind the Chinese AIs are subsidized by the party so theyre not exactly reflective of the real cost.

no if prices were that high, millions of developers would switch to hand writing, open source LLM help and outsourcing at those levels, AI companies know this, you should too.

If OpenRouter prices aren't competitive, the providers would need a cartel to sustain that. It's a commodity market.

Yes they will buy openrouter, pass AI laws and regulations so you all pay extra $$$.This always happen with new real industry. Remember how they built cities for cars. This new laws will day all innovation and slow it for few more decades too but this time they will let China win instead because in China they have all of it aligned, no need to have cartel there. Openrouter and it's new owner will restrict othe models, because they will be part of cartel too.

Or it could be:

1. a subsidized race to the bottom

2. in a frothy bubble market

3. where VC, investments funds are burning money out of FOMO

4. and a desire to eliminate labor costs

5. and governments want to control a technology that will probably be a major military asset

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