Ed Zitron on AI companies having deceived users w/subsidized rates they can't afford: There's no way to right this ship

[highplainsdem]

11. It's the extent to which they're running at a loss that's anything but standard. Most users now pay $20 or

less per month, when the companies lose money with $200/mo subscriptions. It's been over a year already since the CEOs of both OpenAI and Perplexity AI were talking about possible $1,000/mo subscriptions. Altman talking about it had made news, but I didn't see an exact quote or context. I did see a tweet from Srinivas wondering aloud about what AI could give consumers to make them think $1,000/mo would be considered a good deal. I didn't bother looking to see what sort of answers he got, or if there was more discussion of that online. I saw his tweet only because someone I follow had commented. But I remember thinking at the time that he would need users to be really addicted to AI for them to be fine paying $1,000/month for it.

And then Perplexity suddenly, several weeks ago, throttled its $200/year subscription tier to the point where users would have to switch to the $200/month subscription tier to get comparable AI usage.

See the second part of the OP here, the part about Perplexity:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221039651

I don't know if they've since had to relent and give users more for that $200/year subscription. But the fact Srinivas even tried to throttle usage that much shows how desperate he's getting about the gap between what customers are paying and what those customers are costing Perplexity.