AI ALERT: Genealogists need to be aware of AI shrinkflation and subsidies

ChatGPT's image of the "rug pull".

Picture this: you're working away using an AI agent on a kinship analysis and are suddenly cut-off from finishing.You had checked your usage levels before you started the project and had 100% usage available. "I couldn't have tokenmaxxed, what happened?" You've just had your usage throttled by an AI company through no fault of your own - but theirs. This occurred last weekend with Grok Bot. Some customers were sleeping and hadn't even used it and were throttled. When a customer posted on social media asking for a reset, Elon Musk replied to the post,“The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue." Grok Bot is included from the $30 Premium tier of the X Subscription upward, with about 800,000 paid weekly users. As reported by TechRadar, one Reddit thread dubbed Musk’s throttle an “indirect rug pull”, but a more common term also applies "Shrinkflation". Consumers are familiar with shrinkflation even not ever hearing this term: it's when a Taco Bell taco shrinks in size but stays the same price, or toilet paper stays the same price but goes from 425 sheets per roll to 320 sheets per roll. 

The "indirect rug pull" may drive users from Grok Bot to Dots, Duet or Muse, but subscribers of those services should be aware that these other companies' subsidies could subside. Venture capitalists provide funding to AI companies like OpenAI. SemiAnalysis tested subscription tiers from both OpenAI and Anthropic, running coding and agentic tasks until weekly limits were exhausted. It found that a $200 ChatGPT Pro 20x subscription could cost as much as $14,000 in API pricing. Similarly, Anthropic’s $200 Claude Max 20x plan came to about $8,000, and a $20 ChatGPT Plus plan to about $700. In the context of Application Programming Interface or API pricing, it refers to the cost structures (such as pay-per-call, per-request, or token-based usage like input and output tokens for AI models) charged by a service provider when your software application connects to and uses their system.Two caveats regarding these API pricing estimates: First, this is a theoretical maximum at API list prices, not what OpenAI actually spends. The estimate is based on tokenmaxxing out week after week. SemiAnalysis’s own starting point was that it’s widely believed a $200/month plan maxes out at about $2,000 of tokens. Second, the plans have changed since. Trending Topics reports OpenAI halved usage on the $200 Pro plan and added a $500 tier, so the $14,000 figure describes the older plan. Not quite as visible as Grok Bot's throttle, but shrinkflation nonetheless.

For genealogical tasks, such as processing a long run of court record images, agents consume far more compute than chat does. Agentic jobs are the ones most likely to hit weekly caps on flat-rate plans. Some practical advice: heavy users may need to move to pay-per-token API billing, Light users can likely maintain workflows with $20 to $30 plans. Shorter tasks, like a one-record-at-a-time are the least likely to be throttled. Forewarned is forearmed.

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