this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
496 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
85515 readers
4276 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
All the investors know it's a massive money sink right now. The goal isn't for "everyone" to get to use AI.
It's to get so many people used to using AI that businesses like law offices and hospitals and other corporations so ingrained and built around having AI, while leaving so many graduating college students useless without AI, that businesses will be reliant upon it, no matter what costs of it they will have to absorb.
In five years there won't be a $200 plan. There will be a $15,000 plan per person and businesses will pay it because they won't be able to do well without it.
Their investors better hope that's not their plan. It's a terrible business plan, local open AIs will crush any attempt at profit. Local open AIs would already be crushing profits if business were run sensibly. You don't have to train a whole model from scratch. You can just give a pre-trained model your toolset and prompts (things you'd've had to make anyway) and call it a day.
Law offices, hospitals, and insurance companies are not going to set up their own servers, localize an AI, and upload all the custom data sets they need into a pre trained locally hosted model. Everyone could easily host their own cloud backup system as well, but no one does it.
But yes. That's there plan. It's been done multiple times before amongst things. It's how busses eliminated trolleys, how ride share beat out taxis, and how Walmart sells the cheapest Coke. Amazon does it as well. It's a variation of predatory pricing. It's common as hell. Supposed to be illegal, but seldom does anyone get in trouble for it. Crooked government that works for the wealthy n all.
Sure, but they're not hiring Open AI to do custom work. They're hiring some third party who well might use their own servers. Even if they are hiring Open AI there will be a thousand competitors in no time. There's no meaningful cost barrier to set up a local AI. Sure scaling costs a little, but really not much. It's a foolish investment that only works if people are incompetent... okay so might work a little, but it's still stupid.
"I can't quit my job because I'll lose my ~~health insurance~~ AI access."
I think there may also a horizontal scheme as monopolies take on a global scale. Those businesses that sell in bankruptcy due to high tech costs could be gobbled up by the biggest AI-native competition. It's a leap but maybe in a decade your optometrist is replaced by an ai kiosk with a remote technician?
Maybe then he would give me the prescription I paid for....