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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
61–70 of 155 posts
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#62[dead]
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#63Interesting read. I don't know if I quite buy the evidence, but it's definitely enough to warrant further investigation. It also matches up with my personal experience, which is that tools like Claude Code are burning through more and more tokens as we push them to do bigger and bigger work. But we all know the frontier model companies are burning through money in an unsustainable race to get you and your company hoo…
Anthropic has 50% gross margins on their tokens. Step 1) Bubble callers will be proven wrong in 2026 if not already (no excess capacity) Step 2) Models are not profitable are proven wrong (When Anthropic files their S1) Step 3) FOMO and actual bubble (say around 2028/29)
If they had such a high margin, they wouldn't need to fuck around with token usage/pricing every three days.
I have no data to support this, but I think they just about break even on API usage and take overall loss on subscriptions/free plans.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#64AI feels more like a gamble.
People like gambling.
From casinos (win-loose), to lootboxes (uncertainty) or even extramarital sex (whose baby is it?).
This way - AI work is like a slot machine - will this work or not? Either way - casino gets paid and casino always wins.
Nevertheless - if the idea or product is very good (filling high market pain) and not that difficult to build - it can enable non-coders to "gamble" for the outcome with AI for $.
Sadly - from by experiences hiring Devs - hiring people is also a gamble...
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#65AI feels more like a gamble. People like gambling. From casinos (win-loose), to lootboxes (uncertainty) or even extramarital sex (whose baby is it?). This way - AI work is like a slot machine - will this work or not? Either way - casino gets paid and casino always wins. Nevertheless - if the idea or product is very good (filling high market pain) and not that difficult to build - it can enable non-coders to "gamble"…
> or even extramarital sex (whose baby is it?).
This is the weirdest example of "gambling" I have seen in my life. If you'd've written "unprotected sex" I'd see the gambling part, but "extramartial sex" covers so much more than the tiny subset of "whose baby is it" (how many people are there having sex to gamble on who will be the father of a baby? 10?).
This made my day.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#66[dead]
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#67AI feels more like a gamble. People like gambling. From casinos (win-loose), to lootboxes (uncertainty) or even extramarital sex (whose baby is it?). This way - AI work is like a slot machine - will this work or not? Either way - casino gets paid and casino always wins. Nevertheless - if the idea or product is very good (filling high market pain) and not that difficult to build - it can enable non-coders to "gamble"…
Under this definition, everything is gambling, including commenting on HN (will I get upvoted or downvoted?).
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#68[dead]
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#69While I understand why they used the METR data, a cleaner look would be against the current cost-optimal frontier of open models (e.g. GLM-5.1 and MiniMax-M2.7). That paints a very different picture. Comparing just the frontier models at the time of the METR report invariably leads to looking at providers who are pushing the limits of cost at the time of the report. GPT-5 was shown as being on the costly end, surpass…
Calculating hourly costs for these models makes me think that the decision of when to hire an SWE vs. increase use of AI may follow a similar pattern to the decision to use cloud compute vs. on-premises. I don’t cost $120/hr (incl. fringe), but my employer pays my salary all year long, no matter if I am working or on vacation. Whereas if they use an AI model to do the same work, they may be happy to pay $120/hr or more, since they may only use the model for a small fraction of 2080 hours per year, so they’d still save money, and not have a messy human to deal with.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#70Once a model is stable and good enough, for example Sonnet 4.6 or GPT 5.4 (or something else in future), it can be burned into hardware like Talaas chip reducing the cost many times and increasing the speed. At some point we can rely on old model while being productive with it.