I think it's gonna be a lot worse with LLMs. Mainly because they're substantially under charging, I don't think the cost of operating is going to drop much, and the workflows are only going to get more token hungry.
The incentives here are also fucking atrocious. They aren't incentivised to make the model as good as possible. It's in their best interest to tune so it's good enough to not drive you off, but bad enough to push you to spend more.
It wont: if/when LLMs start to get too expensive, people will just migrate to open models, run it local, etc. I see no scenario where we are held hostage by the main providers.
I was a lot more worried about this when only OpenAI and Anthropic had truly great models - but now we also have Google and five different Chinese AI labs who are releasing open weight models that are in the same ballpark as the OpenAI and Anthropic ones. I think we'll be fine.
Very much agreed - right now someone might hold a few months of competitive lead, but open models catch up fast. Plus the lack of any real vendor lock-in means there's just not room for extortionate pricing.
150% increase in 18 years is about triple the rate of inflation
I'd call that more than "a little bit", but I'd agree that if LLMs go the same way it probably doesn't change the equation much at all.
Plus they do still have an $8/mo ad-supported plan. After adjusting for inflation, that's actually cheaper than the original!