Running open models from commodity hosts doesn't appear to be particularly subsidized today. It's not a massive expense, because the biggest cost that's causing the frontier labs to hemorrhage money at the moment is training. Inference isn't terribly expensive for what you get, and seems to be quite comfortably profitable.

I’m already paying the real unsubsidized price with my own GPU.

Maybe it can’t solve a Millennium Prize, but it’s pretty good at writing CSS.

This is flawed thinking - the models will exist even if every company who trained them fails, and then someone else will rehost them and offer them at inference rates. Inference is _astonishingly_ cheap.

If anything, prices would go _down_ as the rehosters wouldn't be saddled with debt from training models.

OpenRouter is full of inference providers for open weight models that are only months behind models like Opus, with a fraction of their price per token. And those inference providers don't do charity.

If optimizing inference was a priority, OpenAI and Anthropic could also focus on it and get the prices down. They are just focusing on their dumb AGI race instead.

Qwen 3.8 runs fine on my laptop with no subsidy.