Pxy abandoned me
Yesterday my prepaid AI Pro account with Pxy (Perplexity) stopped responding to my search and analysis queries unless I paid for more "credits", whatever those are. The same happened this morning. The new paywall seems to be real and not going away. My fully paid up account was supposed to last until Dec. Apparently too many users are costing too much for the old pricing to be honored any more. So now Pxy corp. is imposing a paywall to get more money, even if account holders do not consent to paying more.
☹️
grumpy Pxy camper face
Some non-Pxy searching led to r/perplexity_ai. Lots of folks there are unhappy with what they are getting. This is one of a slew of grumpy Pxy camper posts, Bye bye perplexity.
I emailed Pxy support to ask for a refund of what is left of my account time. Their "customer service" AI called Sam said I could not get a prorated refund because I am outside the "standard refund eligibility window". Sam told me it could understand my frustration. I told non-sentient Sam to fuck off and put me in touch with a human being. We'll see how that goes in the coming days.
The current American AI business model faces a severe profitability barrier. The massive infrastructure and compute costs to run large language models are greater than the revenue generated from standard consumer subscriptions. Prices are going to have to go up a heck of a lot for profitability to be more than just a blowhard marketing mirage.
Are Trump and MAGA politics mostly to blame for this?
Here we have a company stopping providing a service that was fully paid for, and demanding more money to continue providing what was already paid for. That seems to be awfully cheeky. It is an outright breach of contract, unless something buried on page 527 of the applicable terms of service contract says the company can unilaterally demand more money without the customer's prior knowledge or consent.
But given how much American businesses have morally and legally degraded, can one rationally attribute this kind to customer treatment as mostly to Trump and his MAGA politics and policy? After all, Trump has (1) deregulated businesses, (2) blocked most (nearly all?) ongoing and new federal law enforcement against businesses, and (3) takes bribes from businesses to give them want they want to buy from him. Who or what is going to hold Pxy corp., or whatever the company's name is, accountable? Certainly not the FBI, DOJ or FTC. They work for the criminal organization Trump Inc.
Q1: Is this more evidence that the American AI business model is crap because American style AI costs far more to provide than can be significantly made up for by consumer subscriptions?
Q2: Is connecting what Pxy did with Trump politics an example of TDS-2, unreasonably over the top, or otherwise just too irrational to take seriously?
Clinical terminology 🤪:
TDS-1 = Trump derangement syndrome in Trump's deranged mind and the minds of his supporters
TDS-2 = Trump derangement syndrome in the minds of his critics
Info sources:
AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough - The returns on trillions of dollars of spending are deeply uncertain
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Business Model: How AI-Native Companies Make Money - AI-native companies pay real money to serve every query. Traditional software as a service (SaaS) products incur minimal cost to serve one additional customer after the software ships. AI products pay to compute on every interaction, and that cost varies by customer, query complexity and the model that handles the request.
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