Ed Zittrain

Someone else, three grand.

Someone else, $200.

This is direct money to Anthropic and OpenAI.

This is not something where it's, oh, they can claim they're profitable on inference.

This is just straight up token burn.

I would love to see how popular this was if people actually paid what it cost.

Because I think that right now, this all-you-can-eat nonsense is inflating the value of it.

Because if you were paying, Anthropic estimates $13 a day is what someone will spend using Claude Code.

That's a lot of money.

It's hundreds of dollars a month.

I don't think most people get that much value out of it.

If you had to every little fun little turn you had with OpenAI, a couple cents each time, you're spending several dollars a day.

I don't think people would think it was quite as useful.

Also, the hallucination problem, the incorrect information, it applies everywhere.

It's a very bad thing.

But on a fundamental utility level, if this was being charged at cost, I actually think that every journalist should be barred from using it in any way other than token-based billing, because that's the only way you see the realistic cost here.

Because, yeah, if you get this thing massively subsidized and you don't know the real cost, you're creating a completely fantastical environment to explain these things.

100%.

And people will argue, well, the cost of intelligence has come down.

No, not at all.