Remember that I referred to median user here.

> Do you have any data you're basing that claim on, or are you just speculating based off of you projecting?

Anecdata? I guess it depends on what you count as “data”.

I am currently training a lot of people directly or indirectly (train the trainer type of stuff) on how to use AI professionally. I always start with “what do you currently use AI for?”. The answers I listed above are largely the categories that people have told me and the folks I train, with the exceptions being a handful of non-technical folks who have leaned into AI and have used agents and/or created apps of some sort.

To add some categories that I didn’t initially mention, some folks also use AI for drafting/writing documents and for creating meeting transcripts.

> AI maximalists would have you believe that people are using these things as therapists and having conversations with it that are more intimate than any lovers'.

Chatbot… this is something I hear, but I’m guessing I don’t hear all of the examples since it’s personal rather than professional. But some folks certainly say something like “I treat AI like a non-judgmental friend that I can ask personal questions to”.

> AI minimalists would have you believe that no one is using these thing except at gunpoint, and even then.

In my experience, this is almost exclusively the domain of old/older people who are happy to let tech pass them by and young people who are virtue signaling to their peers (or at least trying to).

> Unless you have some reason for us to believe you that isn't just "trust me bro", your portrayl of the median user is as suspect as any other.

It seems like you’re new to HN. I understand your skepticism. There is a relatively high density of actual professionals here. Trust me on that, bro.

My data set numbers are in the 100s, and it is not a statistically representative cross-section of the US or world market. That said, I’m guessing that I have a fairly good range of data points for the US market.

> or are you just speculating based off of you projecting?

This is also a strange thing to say. Why would you assume speculation or jump to projection as the basis for it? Nothing in the comment that you are replying to hints at projection.

The purpose of the high API prices is, in addition to trying to get more money, to anchor the high price, and then make the subscriptions seem like a great deal. But inference is just not that expensive, not when provided at scale and with huge batches.

You can see this with the various Chinese providers doing inference on open models, which are unlikely to cost less to run than the models at the frontier AI labs. A single 8-GPU GB300 cluster doing high-throughput batch inference on Kimi K3.1 Pro, which is the largest open weights model available, can do something like 300 000 tokens per second, that is, 10T tokens per year. That cluster, with current insane inflated prices, costs something like $1M to buy, and $50k to run per year in electricity. At $10/Mtok, that pays itself back in 4 days. Do you think that that's a reasonable price?

The subscriptions were probably priced with reasonable positive margins.

The huge expenses are in training and pushing the models forwards, with the gigantic RLAIF runs we know they are doing. Then once you got the model, you can scale up inference at low cost and want to serve as many people as possible.