> I don't know what to say to you. More people are coding now with AI than ever coded before. If your argument was true, then that would just mean that there are more elites than ever. Obviously that's not what's happening.
I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly.
If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.
Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.
The cost to make a competitor to Anthropic or OpenAI is tens or hundreds of billions of dollars upfront. There will be few competitors and minimal market pressure to reduce prices, even if the unit costs of inference are low.
$200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.
I don't know what definition of "elite" you're using but, "technology limited so that only a small percentage of the population can afford it" is... an elite group.
This is fun and all, but I think we've reached the end of the productive discussion to be had and I don't have much more to say. Charitably, we're leaving in completely different realities. I just hope when the bubble pops the fall isn't too hard for you.
> I don't know how I can explain this any more clearly. If you need AI to create software, and the cost of AI is $200/month, then only people who can afford $200/month can create software.
Your entire hypothetical is based on "ifs" that aren't true. Nothing in this sentence is true. You don't need AI to create software, the cost of AI development is much less than $200/month on average, and many more people can afford AI dev than programming bootcamps or classes or degrees.
> Costs will increase. The current cost is substituted by investor funding. Sell at a loss to get people hooked on the product and then raise the price to make money, a "high-growth business model" as you say.
Inference is already profitable at current pricing. Most funding goes toward R&D for new model training, not inference.
Also, inference costs dropped over 280x between Nov 2022 and Oct 2024. Inference will continue to get cheaper as we develop more specialized hardware and efficient models.
This is not Uber, subsidizing the cost of human drivers. This is real tech, chips and servers and software. Costs fall over time, not rise. Innovation does not go backwards.
> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population.
1. You can build small applications with the $20/month sub, much more with the $100/month. Competition and technology improvements will inevitably improve the price to value ratio.
2. Cable sports subscriptions are in a similar price range. Expensive, but not exclusive to “the elites”.
The median per capita income in the United States is $37,683/year.[0] Depending on your state, after taxes, that's something like ~$2,600/month. You're asking almost 10% of their post-tax income to this just for the opportunity to create software. With rent, food, and other living expenses many households at that income level simply cannot afford this.
This is the median income. If it's a struggle for someone on this income then it's worse for half of all Americans, and American incomes are higher than most of the rest of the world.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...
The bar for "create software" up to this last year or so was "learn software development" or "pay someone else".
Personally, I think millions more people having the ability to create some subset of software is an incredible shift.
[flagged]
> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.
This is an absurd claim. There are many things the majority of the population spends money on that cost more than this.
I'm going to take your comment at face value, and I'm also going to assume that you're US-based.
You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, even those with "middle class" incomes. For many a $200 one-off bill is debilitating, yet alone a recurring subscription. If you don't know that, you have a dangerously narrow view of the economy.
If you think that a $200/month subscription is "out of reach" for the majority of Americans, you are just plainly and simply wrong about that. They might have to make some tradeoffs by reducing spending in other areas, but that's part of life.