This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well so far my Google Smart speakers have two functions:
Don't think I'll miss that if they decide to charge for it.
We're seeing this all over the tech and tech adjacent space. Can't grow forever at a loss, especially not with increased interest rates and a potential economic downturn.
My guess, if you want to have decent services we're going to end up needing to pick few (or a suite of the basics) to pay for on a monthly basic and cut out all the "free" stuff that is/will get enshittified.
in my eyes they put themselves in an awkward position by garnering a reputation of always collecting more user data than justified, and at this point i assume they do the same with paid products as it's an industry norm. however I'm not ok with it and will never pay when the product doesn't respect privacy. the saying used to be "if you don't pay, you're the product", but it is increasingly shifting to: you're the product and also you have to pay so that our shareholders can experience more infinite growth
Na, once ml inference and training chips are purpose built it'll be built into devices. AI models are the mainframes of today
They're already trying this, sort of.
They know charging for total access will cause a riot, so instead they're enshitifying the whole experience and holding access to the current non-shit experience hostage with monthly fees.
I don't understand this. Hasn't Intel or Nvidia (or someone else) been making claims about their next CPUs having AI functionality built-in?
Running AI may be currently expensive, but the hardware will continue to improve and get cheaper. If they institute a subscription fee and people actually pay for it, they'll never remove that fee even after it becomes super cheap to run.
That is sort of the issue when mixing good conscience with capitalism. Either the goods are valued at what we're willing to pay, or either they're valued at what we think the profit margin of the business should be, but mixing the two ultimately leads us to fall for PR crap. Business are quick to gather sympathy when the margins are low, and we fall for this PR crap, but then as soon they own a part of the market it turns into raising the price as much as they possibly can.
That being said, Amazon became what it is because Bezos was hell bent on not rug pulling customers, at least in the early years, so it is possible they would decrease prices eventually to gain market advantage, that's their whole strategy.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The emerging generation of "superhuman" AI models are so expensive to run that Amazon might charge you to use its Alexa assistant one day.
In an interview with Bloomberg, outgoing Amazon executive Dave Limp said that he "absolutely" believes that Amazon could start charging a subscription fee for Alexa, and pointed to the cost of training and running generative artificial intelligence models for the smart speaker's new AI features as the reason why.
Limp said that the company had not discussed what price it would charge for the subscription, adding that "the Alexa you know and love today is going to remain free" but that a future subscription-based version is "not years away."
Generative AI models require huge amounts of computing power, with analysts estimating that OpenAI's ChatGPT costs $700,000 a day or more to run.
Limp, Amazon's senior VP of devices and services, announced he would step down from his role at the company after 13 years a month before the launch of the new products.
Insider's Ashley Stewart reported that former Microsoft exec Panos Panay is expected to replace Limp.
The original article contains 298 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 39%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think at this point with so many tech giants introducing ads to their services and increasing subscription prices, I think we can expect some kind of subscription fee to access assistants with the AI/LLM capability. It would make sense to offer a 'basic' version of these services for free since people have already invested in the hardware, but wouldn't be surprised if these companies suddenly block us from using the smart functionality suddenly unless you pay.
