That is the problem currently the subscription plans are being subsidized by VC money and token buyers. When Open weight get good enough token buyers build their own servers instead of buying tokens then no one to subsidize the subscriptions
99.9%+ of the tech worker population will never be able to build their own servers to run future frontier models. Kimi 3 is an indication of what's coming. These models will keep getting drastically larger. The hardware isn't getting cheaper anytime soon (no matter what China does; that goes for memory and GPUs).
Cycle forward to Fable 7, Kimi 5, GPT 7 a couple years out. Forget about it unless you own a datacenter.
> 99.9%+ of the tech worker population will never be able to build their own servers to run future frontier models.
A single local user can run frontier models slowly on a 24/7 basis, which drops hardware requirements by orders of magnitude compared to a datacenter setup for just-in-time inference. This is not a real alternative to subsidized subscriptions at present, but it's a great insurance policy against future VC-driven rug pulls.
90% of the tech worker population does not work for themselves they work for someone that pays them 1000s in salary for those paying those tech worker spending $40-50k on a server that helps them not pay for 2-3 tech workers is not that big a deal.
