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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
131–140 of 155 posts
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
But is there as much value in the doing the thing in the first place if anyone else can do it cheaply too?
> Although you could argue that anything AI can do is actually deflating in value as well.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, you probably can just turn off defective parts of the network. You better believe if this becomes popular they would salvage yields by selling "dumber" chips at a discount.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#134Not if you use local models, only if you're using cloud llm's
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't suggesting white collar workers attempt blue collar work. I'm merely saying that cheap day laborers with basic experience won't have to lean on their industry mentorship model (journeyman etc) as much and can complete jobs on their own. On the cheap. Today's models are insufficient for someone with 0 hands on experience, especially when limited to text modalities. However, I don't doubt the future ones you d…
Is your opinion here grounded in experience from working in that field, or is it speculation?
This question seems a bit of a non sequitur. I worked along side my father in the trades for over a decade (to pay for college, my house, etc) as I've already stated in my parent post. Unless you're asking about something else?
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Model specialization is in all likelihood going to be the way forward, both for cost and quality of output. Smaller, cheaper models specialized in their task domains. Many of the current model vendors are already (attempting) to do this under the hood. Generalist models have similar problems as generalist humans. The proverbial "Jack of all trades, master of none." That said, I've made my career as a generalist :)
Anyone trying to decide which of 30 different specialized models best fits their task has already failed. Maybe the future of the backend is specialized models but the future of what faces the user is what appears to be a generalist model. Maybe it does things itself, maybe it just knows how to route to the specialist models, but the UX of a generalist model will win.
Users shouldn't be picking models directly at all, unless they really want to (almost no one does), but certainly some will.
I meant more automatic selection and negotiation of which model gets which task based on filtering criteria, etc. so happening under the hood as you say.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean, you probably can just turn off defective parts of the network. You better believe if this becomes popular they would salvage yields by selling "dumber" chips at a discount.
except that if you do, you've just implemented a different model, with no way to tell which part of it is wrong
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#138The 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.
Software developers average about 80 - 120€/h in Austria. How are UK rates so bad?
A quick google seems to suggest the median software pay in Austria is about €60k. That translates to an hourly wage of roughly 31€/h .
Your range of 80-120 gives a yearly wage of like 155k-234k which is clearly far too high for an average.
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#139The sweet spot thing is the real insight here and nobody seems to be talking about it. Frontier models get hyped for their maximum task horizon, but that's also where they're 10-30x more expensive per hour than their optimal range. You're paying a massive premium for the hardest tasks and still failing half the time. Honestly the practical takeaway is pretty boring: just break your work into smaller chunks. Not becau…
You write awfully similar to the way LLMs do. I can't tell if it's just your writing style or not
It's an LLM account, as you can tell from the hallucinated comment in the thread on Japanese penguins: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816256
Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can ablate surprisingly large chunks of a model with near to no effect, you can try this easily - download an open weight model in torch.
Obviously it’s not ideal but you could likely have single digit % of all weights affected and still have a useful model (many caveats here: e.g. locality of damaged weights matters, distribution of errors matters, fail high/low matters, …)