Comment by carlosjobim 17 hours ago
If we stop for a while and really consider the value of AI tools, then comparing them on price doesn't make much sense. Any of these tools give hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars of value per month to the user. With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality.
The same thing is true for a _ton_ of tech products. My home internet plan easily gives me more than $1000 in value per month. My cell phone hardware probably gives me $2000+ in value over even a short 2 year life. Customers still tend to choose the cheapest option that meets requirements.
I don’t know, I ditched my ISP of many years as soon as a better option came up, even though it cost more, because it is much higher quality.
Home internet and cell phones are fungible. AI is not.
If Internet would suddenly become $10k a month, maybe you would change country, or move to an office.
If AI would suddenly become $10k you can't do anything about it.
If AI suddenly became $10k/month or even $1k/month, I would stop using it. It just doesn't provide that much value to me. If it did, I would probably find a way to use local models or some other approach to drive the cost down.
If home internet became $1k/month, I would pay it. $10k, no - I just don't have the cashflow to support that.
If I had to choose one of the three to give up, AI, home internet, or cellphone, I would give up AI. If I had to choose two, I'd give up my cell plan. Home internet is worth a ton of value and dollars to me.
> With that in consideration they should mostly be compared on quality
Take a look at the comments in the thread and tell me whether there is a consensus on which AI has the best "quality". Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT are all stochastic machines; they'll give me a different output at different times for the very same query, with differences in quality each time within themselves, let alone other products.
I did my own checks; newer Gemini's output is consistently "good enough" for me and my family now, we individually do not use the full extent of the Pro plan (collectively, we do), and NotebookLM is something which more than one of us uses everyday; Image generation is something we use once a week or so. Given all this, the feature breadth within Gemini covers all bases for us, with a significant catch-up in quality compared to earlier to a point that we don't really need to look elsewhere for now.
Plus, for us USD 20 is not a small amount; it's equivalent to one of our larger utility bills we need to pay for every month. So price is definitely an important point of consideration.