Or LLMs become a commodity if open models are ever good enough for > 95% of use cases. The product if fundamentally different than tv-shows or movies since its so interchangeable.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)
You can’t calculate what that cost is though regardless. If the gross margin is positive you can’t confidently challenge their longterm growth projections however optimistic or unrealistic they are.
Well if their gross margins are positive (I really doubt they aren’t) there isn’t much of a case to be made. You can expect meaningful R&D and capital investments to pay off short term and you can’t make any meaningful projections either to determine if they are dumping or not.
Yet… VS code somehow became the most popular IDE that happens to be generally viewed favorably by most of its users.
I personally hate it due to various reasons but I don’t feel like the Electron part is the issue (Java based Jetbrains IDEs generally seem way more bloated)
Short term yes. But there is a reason why IDEs, game engine and other development tools have very high cheap or free versions for this market segment. Since these users end up having a huge influence on what companies they work at / end up working at spend their money on.
Of course LLMs are a commodity at this point but if someone is using Codex, Pi etc. at home it becomes more likely they won’t be picking Claude Code at their day job either.
Consumers want to pay as little as possible and companies want to charge them as much as they possibly can. That’s how markets work I don’t understand what does “entitlement” have to do with anything. If loud consumers somehow manage to coerce companies into lowering prices/offering better products that’s a massive win for almost everyone (of course usually its just noise that doesn’t change anything, however it did work on a few occasions).
Easily swappable batteries do have significant downsides, you either need to compromise on capacity or form factor.
Of course that doesn’t mean they should be hard to replace with some tools and effort.
To be fair back in those days laptops only lasted on battery power for a few hours at most (also old batteries had a very short lifetime compared to modern ones) so being able to swap it was an actually useful feature.
All Bethesda’s game generally suck without mods to a bigger or lesser extent. So it takes a while for a community of enthusiasts to appear but something like Oblivion or Skyrim were a much better experience 5-10 years after release than initially.
Of course then you have Starfield which is so unimaginable uninspiring that nothing can really be done to save it..
LLM output is not copyrightable, though? So effectively if you pay for it you can do whatever you want from it. That seems perfectly fair and reasonable.
> progressed due iterating on what has existed is how we progress
Progress was extremely slow until the 1800s. Coincidentally corporation and modern capitalism in general developed around the same time. Of course I’m not necessarily saying it was the main or direct course since it isn’t exactly possible to create an experiment comparing it to other systems (of course that was tried an failed completely in the USSR, Maoist China and similar places)
> fair bunch of scientific and technological breakthroughs
Outside of military technologies they had massively fallen behind the west by the 80s. Without the western tech they licensed or copied they were permanently stuck in the 50s. Even their crappy cars were licensed copies of cheap European cars from the 60s.
When it comes to consumer electronics, vehicles and a bunch of other things they were comically behind. So it’s really not a good example..
> monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.
As bad as it might be empirical evidence shows that historically a superior system has never existed (it might be feasible but everything that was tried underperformed).
Historically most evidence seems to point to the contrary.
Amongst other things after the printing press was created it was impossible for anyone who was an author to survive from their work unless they were independently wealthy or had rich patrons.
How? you would make more money by only manufacturing generic drugs. Investing massive amounts of money to subsidize your competitors would be irrational.
Then the cost would end up being deprecation + electric + some low operating margin (i.e. what non SOTA models cost on OpenRouter)