Executive Summary

• Current LLM costs are heavily subsidized and unsustainable.
• Overuse of SOTA models is driving up costs.
• Running local models could be a cost-effective solution in the future.

The Buzz Score

The Internet’s Verdict: 70% Hyped, 30% Skeptical

Forum Voices

Experts are weighing in on the issue of LLM costs.

We’re still in the ‘$5 airport Uber’ era of LLMs. They’re heavily subsidized, and everyone still complains about costs.

As one expert noted, prices will go down one way or another, unless the market gets cornered.

Prices will go down one way or another. That is of course unless the market gets cornered by restricting model use, restricting supply of essential hardware components or raw materials to make this hardware, etc.

Another expert pointed out that running local models could be a cost-effective solution in the future.

With advancements in chips, this will change in 4-5 years’ time. Currently beefy hardware to run them fast enough to be competitive with the cloud is expensive and even then the small local models quite suck compared to SOTA or even DeepSeek V4 Pro and GLM 5.2.

Focus Keyword: LLM Costs