It does cost more but I found the quality of output much higher. I prefer it over the dumbing of effort/models they were doing for the last two months. They have to get users used to picking the appropriate model for their task (or have an automatic mode - but still let me force it to a model).
making 5x the best value for the money (8.33x over pro for max 5x). this information may be outdated though, and doesn't apply to the new on peak 5h multipliers. anything that increases usage just burns through that flat token quota faster.
I am 90% sure it's looking at month long usage trends now and punishing people who utilize 80%+ week over week. It's the only way to explain how some people burn through their limit in an hour and others who still use it a lot get through their hourly limits fine.
It's hard to say. Admittedly I'm a heavy user as I intentionally cap out my 5x plan every week - I've personally found that I get more usage being on older versions of CC and being very vigilant on context management. But nobody can say for sure, we know they have A/B test capabilities from the CC leaks so it's just a matter of turning on a flag for a heavy user.
someone did the math and posted it somewhere, I forgot where, searching for it again just provides the numbers i remember seeing. at the time i remembered what it was like on pro vs 5x and it felt correct. again, it may not be representative of today.
they've also introduced a lot of caching and token burn related bugs which makes things worse. any bug that multiplies the token burn also multiplies their infrastructure problems.
this is indicative to me that the exponential is slowing down. tool and model progress was huge in 2025 but has been pretty stale this year. the usage changes from anthropic, gemini, and openai indicate it's just a scale of economy issue now so unless there's a major breakthrough they're just going to settle down as vendors of their own particular similar flavor of apis.
I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive. That’s not a bad thing. Giving away stuff for free - or even apparently for free - encourages a poor distribution of value.
> I think it signals that they’ve been so successful that they need to ensure there is some direct financial back pressure on heavy users to ensure that their heavy token use is actually economically productive.
Jesus, the spin on this message is making me dizzy.
They finally try to stop running at a loss, and you see that as "they've been so successful"?
Here's how I see it: they all ran out of money trying to build a moat, and now realise that they are commodity sellers. What sort of profit do you think they need to make per token at current usage (which is served at below cost)?
How are they going to get there when less-highly-capitalised providers are already getting popular?
I built a web-scale infrastructure service that supports tens of millions of end users over a 15-year timeline. One of the most successful moves we made was to charge customers appropriately for their usage and to adjust how we calculate usage from time to time in order to tweak that feedback signal. It's amazing how customers learn to adapt in response to even very modest financial signals - in the aggregate.
I don't think there has been any exponential in terms on inference costs in the last couple of years. In fact, they have worsened as the same relevant hardware is more expensive and so is energy - and to top it off, to stay SotA companies are using larger models with higher running costs. But for some reason people are conflating the improvements in models with the cost of inference.
What makes you think that progress has stopped? Anecdotally I personally seem to think that it's accelerated, I am having conversations with ambitious non tech people and they now seem to be excited and are staying up late learning about cli and github. They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.
> They seem to have moved beyond lovable and are actually trying to embed some agents in their small businesses, etc.
That's the problem - these small businesses are writign code, models from last year are good enough for them, and as a small business they can easily shell out for hardware to self-host.
The minute businesses take-up AI for their business processed, the will to buy each employee a subscription is going to go the way of the dodo.
Honestly? It was the claude code leak that did it. There was a lot more smoke and mirrors than I anticipated, the poisoning tool calls, how their prompting is, how "messy" a lot of it was etc.
I meant that I thought the exponential with the models is slowing down (AGI, etc). The application though for regular people will continue to go forward.
Even if they fix it, and that's a big if - It doesn't really mean anything when they have a ton of MBAs and product managers working internally to make it creep back in. It's going to take a decade to grow trust again and I don't think they're up to the task.
regardless of your opinion of ai in government, sam could not have picked a worse way for optics to swoop in and make a deal. it just looks incredibly bad.
i had that happen on firefox mobile months ago and installed video background play fix which all it does is stop sending the js hooks for when tab/window focus is lost. it was something clearly targeted to mobile browsers for people like me who don't bother with official apps anymore as they're riddled with antipatterns and ads. you can just youtube to the homepage like it's an app anyway.
Certainly not the only one making things worse. Software has become an enemy of the people in the last 10 years. Remember when the internet was nominated for Nobel Peace price?
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