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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

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Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#71

Post by bbatha »

avidphantasm wrote: post #69
easygenes wrote: post #39

While 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 mo…

I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#72

Post by sh4rks »

EdvinPL wrote: post #64

AI 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"…

Writing code by hand is gambling (will it compile or not, will it pass code review or not)

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#75

Post by onchainintel »

bbatha wrote: post #71
avidphantasm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

I remain convinced we won’t look at project estimates as time based in software engineering as our primary cost estimate. And this is transition will happen rapidly. We’re going to shift to a capex/token spend model for project estimates where the business will say “ok I do want that feature for $1000 in tokens”.

I agree with you directionally that project estimates are/will be affected by this but I don't see a scenario in which time is completely removed from the equation with respects to projects & estimates to execute on them. We're all constrained by time, finite resource. It's always a factor in business.

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#76

Post by onchainintel »

ting0 wrote: post #60

No, but the AI labs would love to frame it this way so they can continue to nerf models and increase prices while they use the cheap, highly performant, highly powerful models internally to replace all of your businesses.

Sure is looking that way. What can't Claude do at this point?

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#77

Post by radialstub »

smusamashah wrote: post #70

Once 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.

No, burning models into hardware won't make them faster or reduce the cost. It will cost way more for similar performance as what you would get with a gpu. I am not telling you why, you can go figure that out on your own.

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#80

Post by allan_s »

zipy124 wrote: post #78

The crazy part about this is if you compare it not to US wages but european, for instance in the UK where the median software hourly wage is somewhere around $35-40 an hour, then humans are already cheaper than the best models.

that's what I'm telling my non-tech friends when they say "Looking to how fast AI progress and robotics, me as an electrician, will a robot soon take my job?" I reply to them "My job as a software engineer will be replaced sooner than yours, because for your job, the robot will be much more expensive than the minimal wave, and you don't need to buy a human"
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