Character.AI, the GenAI site that convinced some children to kill themselves, has gone bankrupt after parents sued them.
we found hordes of chatbots explicitly dedicated to themes of pedophilia, suicide, self-harm, and eating disorder coaching, as well as a thriving community of users creating chatbots designed to simulate school shootings, romanticize real mass shooters, and even impersonate the real child victims of mass shootings.
People literally will not be able to afford it. Neither will companies.
They will. Because they won’t be able to function without it. They already can’t think for themselves without asking their AI for help.
Trust me. They’ll pay.
“Trust me.”
Very convincing.
Perhaps for a small group of consumers. Not nearly enough for it to be even close to profitable though. I think you are unaware of the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt these companies are in. And those loans are coming due now and the next years. They will need to pay those debts or else they lose all of the compute, which is literally their entire business. Neither Anthropic or OpenAI owns any datacenters, they are all leased on debt.
They will need to suddenly be more profitable than Microsoft and Google, while they are currently much much less profitable than even the poorest household you can imagine.
I think you’re underestimating the addiction kids have for their AI. They outsource their own opinions.
And I think you’re overestimating the money most families make a month. If they are so in the red that many can’t even afford groceries, do you think they’ll be able to add a hefty AI bill monthly to the amount they already can’t pay? It’s basic maths: If I earn 10 and just to exist I need 12 right now, how will I be able to pay 20 when I add the AI bill if I still earn 10?
Do I think they’ll afford it? No. Will they do it anyway? Yes.
If you aren’t a big tech, you can’t spend money you don’t have.
you are familiar with this history of the open-source/proprietary dialectic yeah? at most deepseek stays a few months behind frontier models. your pessimism feels like a Microsoft windows 7 user’s pessimism about operating systems in 2008 (yes, it will get worse for you specifically because paying for the new model is easier than finding a good free one). If i were you i would probably be pessimistic too, but we would need to ban the open weight models and then VPNs too, and then effectively enforce these bans in order to get the future you predict. I’m not seeing it. And these LLMs aren’t very smart. Ask them about free alternatives and they’ll tell you.
Okay man. We’ll see.
With what money dude. You’re completely ignoring the cost factor here.
Ever hear of debt?? Credit cards. People have been paying with money they don’t have since the dawn of man.
Which will end the first time they can’t make a payment. It’s like you do not understand basic economics. Without a job you can’t pay for things. It doesn’t matter if you have a credit card or not. Your credit card will be closed because you have no income.
Okay buddy. We’ll see. People have been spending money they don’t have since money began. But you believe whatever helps your point make the most sense to you.
I honestly don’t care anymore.
You make it sound as if I could just quit my job right now and just pay for all my expenses with my credit card. I wonder how long I could pull this off :)
I make it sound as if some kids don’t care if they go into debt.
The question is not if addicts would pay a high price for AI (they probably would) but if they CAN afford it (they probably can’t).