It's a big leap to go from "some users may be using large quantities of tokens" to "the labs are burning money on subs in an attempt to kill the competition."
Lots of businesses have subscription programs in which a small number of users are money losers, but which in aggregate make money.
It's not even obvious that the labs are losing a lot of money on even a minority of users; the rate use caps are fairly aggressive for Anthropic, and a cursory analysis of likely actual cost of serving tokens shows they are high margin products at the API level and unlikely to be unprofitable within the usage constraints provided to subscribers.
I do think subscription models make commercial sense because users want predictable costs, and it's a club good in which marginal token cost is zero which helps consolidate their customers' purchasing volume to one provider. But that's a different claim than them serving it unprofitably to kill competition.
Also, they (Anthropic) are transitioning many of their enterprise customers to API consumption billing anyway.
I work in the video AI world.
We gave up on subscriptions long ago. They're rinky dink and get you a paltry amount of utilization before they run out.
The per day per seat costs can exceed $1000. This is already normal for studios, and it's already producing positive ROI.
There's simply no way to price video any other way than by usage. I suspect the same will come for everything.
> There's simply no way to price video any other way than by usage. I suspect the same will come for everything.
I don't think there's any way for all of the current AI models to work except as a usage model. The question is whether or not people are willing to pay for it that way in the long-term.
It sounds like it is producing positive ROI for your side, but I’m curious what the bean counters at the studios think of the bill when the budgets tighten.
positive ROI for customers?
AI is already in commercials, TV, and movies. Companies for the most part just don't tell you because the reaction of the general public is "eww, AI".
It's already here in a big way. You just won't be told about it until the public lightens up on the "AI hate".
I think the vagueness of statements like this is why a lot of people (myself included) are just so very skeptical. Surely some company wants to brag about their use. I don’t doubt it’s found its way into certain spaces, but by and large a lot of the “big” claims have been demonstrated to be borderline fraudulent. That Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise AI fight is fake. It is misleading. Taking existing green screen choreography and using AI to impose Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise’s faces is not what it is being sold as. Darren Aronofsky’s AI works are not good either. They can’t seem to hold a shot for more than a few seconds, why is that?
If the argument is that AI is being used in the background or for some VFX, sure, I’ll buy that. It’s just another tool, then. If it is being used to generate entire scenes, there’s no evidence of this, unless something like that atrocious holiday Coca-Cola commercial is a herald of our future.
As written, your claim is just handwavy. I get you might not be able to cite anything concrete due to NDAs or whatnot but, you also have to understand why a lot of people find this kinda unpersuasive.
I can respond directly to this, I’m a former VFX industry person and still fairly well connected.
The the former you suggested. Background plates and the like. The lack of actual creative direction tools, trite visual style, lack of consistency/repeatability and complete inability to be edited or adjusted easily make it a non-starter for most tasks. Compositors are fast, LLMs are slow at that scale. There are tools like ComfyUI that sit in the “we’re running experiments/useful sometimes” category.
Loads of ML tools are in use and incredibly handy, but fit into that tool category, but actual wholesale video/image generation is not that prevalent, no.