There is weaponized malaise employed by these frontier model providers and I feel like that dark-pattern, what you pointed out, and others are employed to rate-limit certain subscriptions.
* Subscription plans, which are (probably) subsidized and definitely oversubscribed (ie, 100% of subscribers could not use 100% of their tokens 100% of the time).
* Wholesale tokens, which are (probably) profitable.
If you try to use one product as the other product, it breaks their assumptions and business model.
I don't really see how this is weaponized malaise; capacity planning and some form of over-subscription is a widely accepted thing in every industry and product in the universe?
I am curious to see how this will pan out long-term. Is the quality gap of Opus-4.5 over GPT-5.2 large enough to overcome the fact that OpenAI has merged these two bullet points into one? I think Anthropic might have bet on no other frontier lab daring to disconnect their subscription from their in-house coding agent and OpenAI called their bluff to get some free marketing following Anthropic's crackdown on OpenCode.
It will also be interesting to see which model is more sustainable once the money fire subsidy musical chairs start to shake out; it all depends on how many whales there are in both directions I think (subscription customers using more than expected vs large buys of profitable API tokens).
So, if I rent out my bike to you for an hour a day for really cheap money and I do so a 50 more times to 50 others, so that my bike is oversubscribed and you and others don't get your hours, that's OK because it is just capacity planning on my side and widely accepted? Good to know.
Also, this is more like "I sell a service called take a bike to the grocery store" with a clause in the contract saying "only ride the bike to the grocery store." I do this because I am assuming that most users will ride the bike to the grocery store 1 mile away a few times a week, so they will remain available, even though there is an off chance that some customers will ride laps to the store 24/7. However, I also sell a separate, more expensive service called Bikes By the Hour.
My customers suddenly start using the grocery store plan to ride to a pub 15 miles away, so I kick them off of the grocery store plan and make them buy Bikes By the Hour.
Well, if the service price were in any way tied to the cost of transmitting bytes, then even the 24hr scenarios would likely see a reduction in cost to customers. Instead we have overage fees and data caps to help with "network congestion", which tells us all how little they think of their customers.
Yes, correct. Essentially every single industry and tool which rents out capacity of any system or service does this. Your ISP does this. The airline does this. Cruise lines. Cloud computing environments. Restaurants. Rental cars. The list is endless.
I would likely not touch the product because of the implications of providing an LLM full system access. With the pump-and-dump coin chumps, it's possible they use the carapace of software as a hype-vehicle with no relation to the dev.
That has been a thing prior to the rise of LLMs. Tech-bros with their "astonished" faces look with the sub-title of "You need to learn kubernetes, docker, swarm!" etc.
It's just par for the course in our attention economy. Like another poster had said, quite a bit of this is just simple experimentation that occurs.
In my opinion, the "but" is still the "hellbrise" considerations brought up in the Decouple podcast. Renewable energy is fantastic but, at grid scale, has to be coupled with sufficient storage: https://www.decouple.media/p/hellbrise
You can get pretty far with negligible storage. There is a cost tradeoff between storage, peaker plants (those could burn hydrogen, not just natgas) and grid size. 70% renewable with no storage is rather easy.
Not sure if you read the podcast but the whole point is that over-reliance on renewables without a sufficient means to handle oversupply can cause grid instability specific to the Spain/Portugal grid outage.
You don't think this will also have an effect on improving life in the cities where Waymo is utilized? I understand there is the threat to induced demand with too many waymo's being on the road but this is going to help improve city living and in turn, help increase people wanting to live there.
At least in SF, last I checked, it's as expensive, or sometimes more expensive, as Uber/Lyft. It'll serve the same sector of the population as those apps already do, so it's unlikely to actually reduce parking needs.
There's an argument that more competition could reduce prices and/or wait times for consumers, but there's also the argument it'll take away gig jobs, which are already somewhat of a "backup net" for people who need money but can't find a formal job for some other reason.
I don't live in SF anymore. When I did and now that I occasionally visit, I personally don't see any meaningful difference from when only Lyft and Uber operated there.
Honestly, in a lot of ways, yes. I'm a massive critic of Uber, but outside of the hotel areas and nicest neighborhoods, it was often incredibly difficult to successfully call a taxi to pick you up before Uber.
I remember once playing ball all day in the front yard, calling all the taxi companies just on a lark. They'd claim they were sending a driver, that the driver pulled up and honked, but we were outside the entire time. No one ever actually drove up over about 20 calls to 6 cab companies.
Uber/Lyft finally served all neighborhoods mostly equally, and that was a huge benefit.
It might but I’ll be still driving home “intoxicated” so long as the vehicle I drove to the drinking establishment can’t drive itself home. This is why I prefer the model for personal self driving vehicles.
Waymo can easily charge a premium for not having a driver in the seat. Privacy and physical security guaranteed? Also not dealing with the moral implications of what the driver is receiving in terms of compensation (or in the case of uber, not).
They're, in my customer impression, quite a world different.
While I agree and I'm not the OP you're replying to this feels like the burden of societal correction needs to be on the wronged and not on the person committing it?
It's tolerating the intolerant (their intolerance to understanding social order). They need to be bludgeoned back (metaphorically).
While I agree, that's a present devil meaning that it's already an accepted way of life. I'm curious how Gogoro's model of swapping batteries would fair in the denser Indian markets.
Once outside Tier 1 cities, density significantly reduces. Additionally, the Indian consumer is aspirational, and if forced to purchase a new vehicle would prefer a used car over a new 2-wheeler.
Anecdotally, in my ancestral village, my relatives preferred buying a used Maruti Suzuki for 1 Lakh (roughly $1k) instead of spending the equivalent amount on a new bike.
In the Vietnamese side of my family, everyone is ignoring the recent diktat to upgrade to electronic motorbikes for the same reason (why spend almost a year's income to purchase a vehicle when inflation for daily staples has been high)
I feel there is an opportunity for EV cars, but they face stiff competition from Kei/900-1100cc cars that cost around $4k-8k.
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