this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
108 points (96.6% liked)
Technology
85075 readers
3948 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What about cheaper llms from other locales? It's hard to imagine the government blocking access writ large, though I'm sure many in this administration salivate at the thought.
This isn’t about anyone blocking access like censorship. This is an economic issue. The LLM companies are all hemorrhaging cash, and none of them have a clear or realistic path to profitability.
Agreed.
What happens when we can buy access to a Singaporean or French LLM on the cheap as the US monoliths raise this paywall?
I'm pretty sure French AI companies (and maybe the others) will have to raise their prices. There is no magical alternative.
Then everyone uses that provider for a few month and they have to raise prices as well or go bankrupt.
That’s.. not how LLM infrastructure works.
Yep, this person did not take DeepSeek into account.
I wouldn't put it past them banning it once they see how much it's kicking their asses though
It's not a question of how good or bad the LLM is, it's a question of watt hours and bandwidth. It takes a certain amount of electricity to run so your prices and profit margins are directly correlated with the price of electricity.
LLMs run out of data centers with cheap electricity and cheap bandwidth are going to be the cheapest ones on the market. For electricity this would typically be places with cheap renewables nearby like large hydroelectric plants. Bandwidth is a little trickier as there's not as obvious an indicator of where bandwidth is cheap and plentiful but typically it's going to be near major population centers. Putting those together there's probably only a small handful of locations in the world where it's economically viable to run these data centers.