Because you can access it for free? As it was the case from the first day LLMs became a thing in public consciousness?

Or did I miss the change, and ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini no longer have a free tier anymore? And then the next tier that costs peanuts for anyone in the west, that gives you more access to slightly fresher models?

That is interacting with it - which people are getting charged more and more for.

The first ones are free.

And as long as they keep the weights proprietary (which all the major players are for their primary models), they can decide to charge whatever they want later.

> which people are getting charged more and more for.

Completely false. The price for LLM inference at a given level of model intelligence has been dropping like a rock.

There are more expensive models available, but you don't have to use them. The same LLM knowledge that was available a couple years ago is now free to download and run on your laptop.

Says no one managing a corp budget!

I’m talking about price for a given output.

You’re talking about companies using more tokens.

Completely different concepts. As I said, the price for a given quality of LLM output continues to decline. Has nothing to do with companies using more tokens.

I’m talking about they can charge you whatever, and you don’t own anything so you don’t get a say.

Whatever was released in the open as weights is forever out there and beyond reach of any corporate interest.

it’s like you can’t even read

Exactly. Companies like Anthropic do not want open access. See their FUD against "distillation attacks"

I keep coming to this thought too. If we really get to the point that AI can produce all the software we need, do any knowledge work we need, why wouldn't Big AI just use it to do that and take you out of the loop? Are "AI developers" making the flashlight app in the App Store right now?