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The current AI pricing was always going to go away

arnon.dk

21–30 of 100 posts

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#21

This is where open source models are important. The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet. The state of the art models are going to get better and more expensive and smaller models are going to get cheaper. There will be a point where the intelligence of both the cheap and state of the art models are indistin…

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Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#23

I wonder how much of Uber blowing their AI budget and MSFT pulling their claude code licenses can be attributed to "tokenmaxxing". When Meta announced token leaderboards and other followed, I could see this being the logical conclusion. That whole trend is so dumb because it leads to this. Company announces they will measure developer performance by how many tokens they burn and constantly talks about how the best de…

The same here, where I haven't come close to hitting any of my CC limits. Even though I'm more productive than I've ever been (as measured by finished, valuable tasks running in production) and I'm clearing out months of backlog, I have either one of two conclusions when I hear about others who suggest they need more:

1. I'm doing it wrong. Apparently I'm supposed to give it a vague paragraph about what the business does, and I can run off and sip margaritas and wake up to a fully fleshed business

2. They don't know what they're doing, and they're sending the LLM off on a wild goose chase that it does a reasonable job of working it's way out of, so they consider it success despite the waste.

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#24

I wonder how much of Uber blowing their AI budget and MSFT pulling their claude code licenses can be attributed to "tokenmaxxing". When Meta announced token leaderboards and other followed, I could see this being the logical conclusion. That whole trend is so dumb because it leads to this. Company announces they will measure developer performance by how many tokens they burn and constantly talks about how the best de…

I make like 2 prompts a week to gemini flash on the weband get more done than all the people that are exhibiting literal manic behavior in the way they use LLMs.

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#26

This is where open source models are important. The latest deepseek v4 pro model is 2-5x cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6. Cursor's Compose 2.5 that was just recently released is 6x cheaper than Sonnet. The state of the art models are going to get better and more expensive and smaller models are going to get cheaper. There will be a point where the intelligence of both the cheap and state of the art models are indistin…

Deepseek V4 Flash is far cheaper still, and a better model to compare to Sonnet 4.6. I'm finding it a reliable workhorse.

Yep, people who never used it say it is not good.

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#27
post #15

What is the OP talking about. $/unit intelligence is going down rapidly. You can achieve what would have been considered miracles in 2022 with < $10.

Absolutely, though I think the expectations are being set by those who have watched too many "OpenClaw business on autopilot" videos.

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#29

It's hard to take this piece seriously if he's citing _Ed Zitron's_ math, and equally hard to make the blanket statement that flat-rate plans = "the current AI pricing". But yes, those pricing models were pretty silly and unsustainable.

Get back to me when there's an AI company that's actually profitable and we can compare their service and pricing.

Claiming that there's some small subset of their services (like inference per token) that's "profitable" doesn't mean anything when it relies on everything else that company is still paying for. If you could make money from it at current prices - why aren't they?

Otherwise it's just "how much they're willing to subsidize".

Re: The current AI pricing was always going to go away

#30
post #12

Insofar as I can tell, inference is on a certain path toward becoming "free". The models are now extremely powerful on high-end consumer hardware, and the efficiency trend seems likely to continue. Here is a recent non-rigorous benchmark I ran against a bunch of models. Qwen3.6 35B A3B fine-tuned with opus data runs plenty fast on my local machine and produce outstanding results - easily in the top 5, comparable to G…

That local hardware is not consumer though but prosumer. Consumer is a 500$ laptop running that and that is not currently the case.
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