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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

I have not been attributing it so much to malice, just that all the major cloud vendors seem to be running at full capacity, and can't build new datacenters fast enough. I just kind of assumed that as they got busy training newer models, that they allocated less resources to handle the existing systems, because they aren't able to get more capacity right now.

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I’m not sure why this point keeps coming up — if your service/product is so popular that it’s capacity-constrained, then the answer is to raise prices, not degrade service, because the demand should be inelastic.

This really depends where the load shedding point is.

A very small raise in prices may cause a very large loss in customers that you risk never getting back.

For example if customers figure out that the Chinese models are just as good, they are gone because they are so much cheaper.

Exactly, it’s not a good business to be in if they’re capacity-constrained and can’t raise prices.

Raising prices also has second order effects, like consumer and business expectations around how widespread the tech can be. Valuations depend on it being reasonably affordable to roll out on a much more massive scale than today. If people get the impression that it seems too limited to very rich people (200 is affordable for a North American / Western European professional), the impression about the trajectory will change.

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