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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)

#91

Post by jillesvangurp »

lwhi wrote: post #89
jillesvangurp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. AI is not really replacing people but it's definitely allowing them to do more and more interesting things. You should offset the cost of having an AI do something against the cost of doing that manually. Your mileage may vary of course. But I am definitely getting things done that I wouldn't even have started without AI assistance. And that stuff is valuable to me. Although you could argue that anything AI…

Value feels pretty relative to me. If anyone can do a 'thing', is that thing worth less?

If you still need that thing done, the value is basically however you value your time. Would you pay extra for having someone or something do that for you instead?

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

#92

Post by rickandmorty99 »

onchainintel wrote: post #76
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?

I'm an AI engineer with a computer science and some actual AI background. I am trying to make Claude good motivation letters for applying to jobs. It currently scores a 6 out of 10. I'm much better still. And it has access to all the relevant parts of my psychology degree and data about writing good motivation letters.

All I can say is: the motivation letters don't look like they're written by AI anymore.

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

#93

Post by GorbachevyChase »

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.

I have a lot of AI written software, and it doesn’t cost me anywhere close to what I’ve been quoted for other software projects in the past. I’ve had a guy spend over six months, full-time, on a CRUD application for permits. He didn’t even finish. I made a working prototype in Django, which was tossed to re-implement in PHP for some reason.

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

#94

Post by naveen99 »

bitwize wrote: post #26
naveen99 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud can’t make money off of you and pay more than you for the hardware at the same time.

Cloud can pay more for RAM until all the RAM producers withdraw from the consumer market, then prices will go back down. End users will still get access to RAM. The cloud terminal they purchase from Apple, Google, Samsung, or HP will have all the RAM it will ever need directly soldered onto it.

Ram upgrades are happening because of ddr5. Nvme upgrades are happening because of pcie5. Prices will come down once everyone is done upgrading.

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

#95

Post by zozbot234 »

adrian_b wrote: post #56
zozbot234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a given capacity of memory, Flash uses far less power than DRAM, especially when used mostly for reads. Flash has no idle power being non-volatile (whereas DRAM has refresh) but active power for reading a constantly-sized block is significantly larger for Flash. You can still use Flash profitably, but only for rather sparse and/or low-intensity reads. That probably fits things like MoE layers if the MoE is spar…

Modern flash memory, with multi-bit cells, indeed requires more power for reading than DRAM, for the same amount of data. However, for old-style 1-bit per cell flash memory I do not see any reason for differences in power consumption for reading. Different array designs and sense amplifier designs and CMOS fabrication processes can result in different power consumptions, but similar techniques can be applied to both…

The basic physics of reading from Flash vs. DRAM are broadly similar, and it's true that reading from SLC flash is a bit cheaper, but you'll still need way higher voltages and reading times to read from flash compared to DRAM. It's not really the same.

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

#96

Post by tomrod »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #88
smusamashah wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't this happening here https://taalas.com/ already. They have a demo of llama running at 17000 tokens per second https://chatjimmy.ai/

With some research, that chip appears like it would cost about $300-$400 to manufacture, die only. For an 8B parameter model. Opus is estimated at 500B-2T parameters. At that scale you’re past reticle limits and need HBM and multi-die packaging, which means you’ve essentially built an inference ASIC (like Groq or Etched) rather than something categorically cheaper than GPUs. The “burned into silicon” advantage mostly…

Does the cost scale linearly/superlinearly? What does the $300-$400 price data point tell us with relationship to the parameter density?

No gotchas here. I genuinely don't know that 8B parameters is in a zone with significant decreasing marginal returns -- too far out of my knowledge area but genuinely curious.

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

#97

Post by avidiax »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #93
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.

I have a lot of AI written software, and it doesn’t cost me anywhere close to what I’ve been quoted for other software projects in the past. I’ve had a guy spend over six months, full-time, on a CRUD application for permits. He didn’t even finish. I made a working prototype in Django, which was tossed to re-implement in PHP for some reason.

My understanding is that this is normalized to the "best human" for the tasks.

An AI only doing a task correctly 50% of the time may in-fact be better than your N% chance of hiring a highly capable human for that task, and especially for contracting a human to a 1-2 hour task.

But your successful use of AI is still predicated on a human who can judge output and break the work into smaller tasks that fit the skill ceiling of the AI, which is currently no more than tasks that take a skilled human 2 hours.

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

#98

Post by avidiax »

tomrod wrote: post #96
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With some research, that chip appears like it would cost about $300-$400 to manufacture, die only. For an 8B parameter model. Opus is estimated at 500B-2T parameters. At that scale you’re past reticle limits and need HBM and multi-die packaging, which means you’ve essentially built an inference ASIC (like Groq or Etched) rather than something categorically cheaper than GPUs. The “burned into silicon” advantage mostly…

Does the cost scale linearly/superlinearly? What does the $300-$400 price data point tell us with relationship to the parameter density? No gotchas here. I genuinely don't know that 8B parameters is in a zone with significant decreasing marginal returns -- too far out of my knowledge area but genuinely curious.

Die size increases cost exponentially, by decreasing chips per wafer and decreasing yield.

I expect that this kind of burned-in model is also very difficult to verify (how do you know if some of the weights are off), and not amenable to partial disablement to increase yield. For CPUs, you just laser disable bad cores. Can't forego part of a neural net.

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

#99

Post by BarryMilo »

pocksuppet wrote: post #86
stavros wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under this definition, everything is gambling, including commenting on HN (will I get upvoted or downvoted?).

There used to be forums without voting. It was discovered that forums with voting attract more engagement because of the emotions produced by the voting.

It also used to be that reddit comments were the epitome of quality in their time, much closer to current HN if not better. I attributed that to the voting mechanism; clearly I was mistaken.

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

#100

Post by segmondy »

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.

Humans are not cheaper than AI models. Let's go with $35 an hour.

24365 = 8760 8760$35 = $306,600

Yeah, a human working non stop will run $300k.

Now you said, the "best" models. I personally reckon that 80-90% of most work don't need the best models. They need a good model, and good models are super cheap. i.e, the tiny gemma4 or qwen3.6 models will be sufficient for most of those work.

AI cloud usage cost goes up near linearly, but local cost doesn't. So say someone built an under $10k system, with perhaps dual RTX 5090. That same system will be able to easily run 20 parallel requests. The only cost is electricity. You can run it 24/7. For 1 year, that's ~$6million. 20 humans will also have overhead of electricity, real estate and other things which far exceed the cost of electricity for just AI.

The thing AI agents are lacking is agency and autonomy. As they get closer and closer, the majority of humans competing in the same sort of tasks will have no chance.

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