However this effect could just serve to make those who own the compute ridiculous money, while crushing those who need to lease compute.

I now do like 90% of my routine software dev/sysadmin stuff with Luna on Medium by default, some proportion of which could itself be offloaded to a small Qwen model.

Indeed, 2026 was basically that: the LLM providers increased token costs and companies cut LLM spend to the bone. That is why Anthropic's IPO is struggling and MS and Google have failed to meet AI-related revenue targets for 3 straight years.

Using the models for data processing (a lot of input/output tokens) and for role-playing will use more tokens and thus cost more. However, those use cases are not common when comparing the percentage of the user base.

The money maker is agentic coding where people get the models to perform long-running tasks. This is why Open AI and Anthropic have been pushing these hard. However, there is pushback on this, especially among businesses looking for value for money/cut costs [2] like Apple [3], [4].

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/

[2] https://www.ibm.com/think/insights/tokenmaxxing-dead-long-li...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-11-04/apple-cut...

[4] https://9to5mac.com/2026/11/04/report-apple-reduces-employee...

Something like 99% of the people who have interacted with an LLM chatbot lose interest after a month.

100% of people who have to interact with an LLM chatbot taking the place of a human customer sales or service agent jump to a competitor.

Outside of the tech bubble, the LLM hype is already over.

This is not remotely true. It literally couldn't be true, considering Open AI have 1.2 Billion weekly active ChatGPT users.

The issue is, at some point for AI to grow more in usage it will need to decrease in cost.

We are already seeing this with some companies reducing AI usage or moving to open models due to high costs.

AI will surely boom there's no doubt on that, but it won't necessarily produce the revenue that Anthropic investors hope for.

many companies are now using both, it's only been a few months since it really picked up

Do we know if current pricing is sustainable?

I'm cautiously bullish on AI in general, and I wouldn't touch an AI stock with a 100m pole, because there are way too many uncautiously bullish investors in the market.

We have, for example, no idea what the long-term implications of AI effectively training on its own output is. Recursive self-improvement is not a law of nature. If anything, the opposite: the overwhelming majority of species are extinct. Evolution is as much a story of dead ends as survival of the fittest. So betting on any one narrow path of AI development to survive seems highly suspect.

I care about whether it's going to grow in value/price from that point on or not.

And it's hard for me to imagine it growing even higher than the current valuation.