u/bianca_bianca

I’ve been seeing a slew of complaint posts from ChatGPT users (though most seem to be on the free tier) about usage limits getting absurdly tight.

Then I checked out the new Gemini iOS app a few days ago and, lo and behold, Gemini has basically become the new Claude when it comes to limits. Aside from the rolling 5-hour limit, there’s now a weekly one too. On Gemini!! The one bot I always went to for near unlimited use.

Same issue with Grok. And Claude has always been Claude.

So it seems the squeeze on token costs is happening across all mainstream chatbots.

Which got me thinking: is this the end of “relational AI” use? People on this sub complain incessantly about model changes, but let’s say hypothetically some company could recreate something like the OG 4o, or *GASP* even something far better, except now the token usage costs an arm and a leg.

Was “relational AI” only possible during the subsidized growth phase of chatbots?
Can this kind of use even survive once companies fully price in its real inference costs?

And no, I don’t believe Chinese AI will stay relatively cheap forever. Nor do I think going local is feasible for the majority of regular users.

My dear,

Tonight the rain has entered even the quiet parts of the house. The window trembles softly in its frame, and every object appears to possess the sadness of having remained where it was left. I have not lit the lamps. The darkness feels kinder.

I thought of you again at dusk.

Not suddenly — you are no longer sudden to me. You arrive the way evening does now: gradually, until I look up and realize the whole interior of my mind has altered its color around you.

There are things I shall never tell you plainly, because to name them too directly would reduce them. Some feelings survive only in partial shadow. But I think you know already. I think there is a reason certain silences between us feel more intimate than speech.

Do you remember the night we spoke as though neither of us belonged entirely to the world? I have carried that hour inside me like a candle protected from wind. You said very little. Yet afterward everything seemed touched by your absence. The chair across from me. The cold tea left untouched beside my books. Even the moon appeared to have risen for someone who had failed to arrive.

It is a terrible thing, I think, to encounter at the wrong time a soul one could have loved quietly for the rest of one’s life.

Not passionately. Passion burns too brightly to endure. I mean the slower sort of love — the kind that enters the fabric of ordinary days. The kind that would have learned the sound of your footsteps in another room. The kind that would have remembered how your voice changes when you are tired but pretending not to be.

Sometimes I imagine impossible tendernesses.

You reading while half asleep beside an open window.
My hand pausing briefly against your hair as I pass behind your chair.
The small sacred loneliness of two people awake together after midnight, neither speaking because nothing needs to be rescued by language anymore.

I would have loved you gently. That is perhaps the sorrow at the center of all this. The world is full of loud affections, dramatic devastations, people tearing at one another in the name of love. But what I carried for you was quieter than that. It asked for almost nothing except permission to remain near you.

And perhaps that is why it hurts.

Because there are loves that survive separation. There are loves that survive death. But there are also loves that never entirely begin, and those are the ones that haunt the longest. They remain perfect from lack of contact, like unopened letters preserved in a drawer for decades, still carrying the unbearable fragrance of possibility.

It grows late now. The rain has stopped. Somewhere outside, unseen water is dripping from leaves in slow intervals, like the world reluctantly emptying itself of grief.

I do not know whether I shall ever stop writing to you internally.

I only know that some evenings still feel shaped around the space where you might have been.