Thanks to Elon's greed, the era of people using AI to vibe code projects will be ending soon.
Now that SpaceX has an IPO they need to make money for shareholders. They are going to help this by raising the price of their Grok service a good ten or twenty fold. Businesses that have grown to rely on these subscriptions will continue to pay - the rest of us will be limited to trial/minimal usage.
And before you think you'll just move to ChatGPT or some cheaper service, they will all be doing this together. OpenAI needs a bailout. Grok needs a AED. Just like Uber, the days of their subsidization is over.
This was always the direction where AI was heading though. All these companies didn't spend hundreds of billions of dollars so that they could give us free/cheap service. They wanted to make a shitton of money from it and become powerful and control the global market.
It was like the drug dealers who give some poor bastard a sample. They don't do it because they like him
They want to get him hooked and addicted so that they can have a consistent source of revenue and become filthy rich...
And as long as there is no proper competition going on (there is Chinese stuff like DeepSeek but it is not enough) they can charge whatever they want and prices won't break.
Closed lab moats have to stay on their toes as open-source agentic tooling, tokenization efficiencies, and WebGPU compute steadily bridge the capability gap. As open weights and local bare-metal setups mature, they offer a grounded counterweight that makes centralized API lock-in much harder to sustain in the long run.
Did you see Manus before Meta acquired them? Aside from them having to sell it back and stuff, Manus actually counters your entire argument. Big lab saw a Chinese model threat and immediately whipped out the checkbook, then the Chinese govt clawed it back (Meta still dropped the ball with it imo).
Based on how the attention mechanism works, simply observing features and providing shape can result in whatever you want nowadays. I can observe a frontier model's capabilities and have a skeleton of that feature built locally based on the shape I see. I can browse an arXiv whitepaper for a concept or philosophy on agentic frameworks and have it deployed before the guy who wrote the thesis.
These features can't really be patented, copyrighted, trademarked, etc., because they are essentially mirrors of user intent based on prediction engines. My 2 sats.
