Google AI Ultra

These prices are nuts, in my opinion. It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings - this used to be the case for specialist software in the past (e.g., in the medical sector), but AI has the potential to be useful for anyone.

Not a good development.

And I think it is a good thing. If there are buyers, it means they are getting that much value out of it. That there is a market for it. Competition will bring prices down.

> Competition will do its thing and bring prices down.

It won't. For now the AI "market" is artificially distorted by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies dumping insane amount of cash into NVDA, but when the money spigot dries out (which it inevitably will) prices are going to skyrocket and stay there for a loooong time.

How will prices skyrocket when there is a flood of open models? Or are you talking about GPU prices? They're already high.

Who do you think is paying to train those open models? The notable ones are all released by VC-funded startups or gigacorps which are losing staggering amounts of money to make each new release happen. If nobody is making a profit from closed models then what hope do the companies releasing open models have when the money spigot runs dry?

The open models which have already been released can't be taken back now of course, but it would be foolish to assume that SOTA freebies will keep coming forever.

> used to be the case for specialist software

I think that's a great example of how a competitive market drives these costs to zero. When solid modeling software was new Pro/ENGINEER cost ~$100k/year. Today the much more capable PTC Creo costs $3-$30k depending on the features you want and SOLIDWORKS has full features down to $220/month or $10/month for non-professionals.

> It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings

The $20/month plan provides similar access. They hint that in the future the most intense reasoning models will be in the Ultra plan (at least at first). Paying more for the most intense models shouldn't be surprising.

There's plenty of affordable LLM access out there.

ChatGPT is insanely subsidized. The $20/month sub is such a great value. Just the image gen is about $0.25 a pop through the API. That's 80 image generations for $20.

I do not think I will ever be able to afford hardware that is capable of running local LLMs. :(

What I can afford right now is literally the ~20 EUR / month claude.ai pro subscription, and it works quite well for me.

It won't be the end of the world if the 'progress' were to slow down a little, I have trouble keeping up with what's available as it is - much less tinkering with it all

Off-topic, but I work 'around' PTC software, and am surprised to see them mentioned. Got much knowledge in the area?

On-topic, yeah. PTC sells "Please Call Us" software that, in Windchill's example, is big and chunky enough to where people keep service contracts in place for the stuff. But, the cost is justifiable to companies when the Windchill software can "Just Do PLM", and make their job of designing real, physical products so much more effective, relative to not having PLM.

> How will prices skyrocket when there is a flood of open models?

Easy: once the money spigot runs out and/or a proprietary model has a quality/featureset that other open-weight models can't match, it's game over. The open-weight models cost probably dozens of millions of dollars to train, this is not sustainable.

And that's just training cost - inference costs are also massively subsidized by the money spigot, so the price for end users will go up from that alone as well.

It will because "keeping up" is the sleight of hand. By constantly tweaking the model you don't ever notice anything it's consistently wrong about. If they "slowed progress" you'd notice.

Current AI is Fast Fashion for computer people.

I only worked with it decades ago. At the time, the split between wages, software, and hardware was about equal. Then the computers became free, and the software has been getting cheaper all the time.