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The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

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Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#41

Post by anthonypasq »

ACCount37 wrote: post #21
CuriouslyC wrote: post #17

Models like Cursor's Composer 2.5 show that you can get real work done without the crazy costs just by focusing on a domain. AGI is silly in part because models are spiky, in addition to making the model more expensive for all queries, you can't easily tell a priori what the model will be good at. The smaller focused model is cheaper to run and if you try to ask a coding question to a biology/chemistry model (or vice…

"Focusing on a domain" has a hard ceiling. A model's capability is a function of model size, and you can only push a small overspecialized "idiot savant" model so far before its crippling size starts to bite you. You can make a model like Composer 2.5. But Mythos 5 will beat it on capability, both at coding and at everything else. And the world is always hungry for more capabilities. If you're running high on agentic…

Mythos is 20x more expensive though

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#42

Post by jermaustin1 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #21
CuriouslyC wrote: post #17

Models like Cursor's Composer 2.5 show that you can get real work done without the crazy costs just by focusing on a domain. AGI is silly in part because models are spiky, in addition to making the model more expensive for all queries, you can't easily tell a priori what the model will be good at. The smaller focused model is cheaper to run and if you try to ask a coding question to a biology/chemistry model (or vice…

"Focusing on a domain" has a hard ceiling. A model's capability is a function of model size, and you can only push a small overspecialized "idiot savant" model so far before its crippling size starts to bite you. You can make a model like Composer 2.5. But Mythos 5 will beat it on capability, both at coding and at everything else. And the world is always hungry for more capabilities. If you're running high on agentic…

I'm not a very smart person, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I think the path forward will have agents that use models that are individually specialized tasks (some might use a bigger model, some might use smaller models), then orchestrators that are good at knowing when to use which agent type.

I've played around with this in my own tiny coding agents, for TTRPG NPCs, and even a small experiment where LLMs controlled a MUD client as an NPC that played the game with you (only 5 rooms in the experiment).

Basically, break the tasks down into chunks so you don't have to use generalist models for everything, and can chose the right model for the job.

I'm also running all of this locally, where a generalist foundation model doesn't work, and heavily quantized models don't perform well for all tasks, so for unlimited token budgets, my solution is probably overkill.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#43

Post by spwa4 »

smallmancontrov wrote: post #29
spwa4 wrote: post #18

If only every government had competition departments who had essentially ONE job: prevent companies from getting away with this ... Oh wait.

The Reagan / Bork "Consumer Welfare Standard" intentionally crippled anti-trust 40 years ago. By legislating robber-baron talking points, it succeeded in transforming the US business sector into what you see today: big moats, high profits, low competition. The good news is that, after 40 years of Democrats not prioritizing opposition to the Reagan/Bork CWS, the issue is back on the ballots. Lina Khan picked up the to…

Okay ... and for all of Europe?

Also this does not explain why, for example, the New York city government didn't stop them in New York. After all, they sold licenses ("taxi medaillons"), which came with the explicit government promise their position would be protected against competition. That was the deal. In fact, a lot of city governments did this.

They just abandoned it (without, of course, giving anyone their money back, but it's not like that would have helped)

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#44

Post by Someone1234 »

BosunoB wrote: post #36
Someone1234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This rumor is not demonstrably true. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft/Meta/Google are all at a net negative on AI (i.e. they're "demonstrably" losing money). So it is objectively true. If everyone is losing money, and nobody is profitable, then it is a demonstrable fact. As far as I know, the only "AI" venture currently in the green is Nvidia, and they're selling shovels to gold miners.

They are losing money because they are training new models and building new data centers. The claim of the video is that they're losing money just serving current AI models. There's just no evidence of that.

> They are losing money because they are training new models and building new data centers.

Neither of which ever goes away. These aren't short term costs, they're the costs of running their business, and it isn't profitable.

> The claim of the video is that they're losing money just serving current AI models.

Which is true. Every one is losing money, none are profitable. They're losing money serving current AI models.

> There's just no evidence of that.

Their own profit/loss statements are "evidence of that." According to these companies themselves, they're at a net loss every quarter. So it isn't clear what more "evidence" people need or expect.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#45

Post by moralestapia »

anthonypasq wrote: post #39
moralestapia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is demonstrably true. Grab gpt-oss-120b, run it continuously and see how far 20 dollars worth of that gets you. People definitely use much more than that in a month, not just power users but regular ones, and they're using models that are more expensive to run (plus the "cloud" markup).

i mean this is difficult to calculate because of prompt cacheing, the ratio of input/output token etc, but if you just do some napkin math, i find it hard to believe people are getting this many tokens on a $20 plan. heres some napkin math gpt oss 120b is in/out price at 0.039/ 0.18 per million on open router. heres some assumptions. 1. the ratio of input/ouput is about 25/1. (coding is mostly grep and fairly low out…

I didn't say "use openrouter" as you might end using subsidized resources, part of the argument is to avoid that and reach the true capital cost of inference per token (or something like that).

I meant, buy/lease the hardware that lets you run this model, run gpt-oss-120b and measure. I did this once and it was like 10x more expensive than any hosted alternative, and $20 wouldn't get you far there.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#46

Post by ACCount37 »

anthonypasq wrote: post #41
ACCount37 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Focusing on a domain" has a hard ceiling. A model's capability is a function of model size, and you can only push a small overspecialized "idiot savant" model so far before its crippling size starts to bite you. You can make a model like Composer 2.5. But Mythos 5 will beat it on capability, both at coding and at everything else. And the world is always hungry for more capabilities. If you're running high on agentic…

Mythos is 20x more expensive though

Fable 5 is listed at merely x2 of Opus 4.8 on OpenRouter. $10/$50 per 1M I/O, vs $5/$25.

Now, Fable 5 is currently borderline unusable because of asinine filters. But I assume they'll fix this shit eventually.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#47

Post by ACCount37 »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #42
ACCount37 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Focusing on a domain" has a hard ceiling. A model's capability is a function of model size, and you can only push a small overspecialized "idiot savant" model so far before its crippling size starts to bite you. You can make a model like Composer 2.5. But Mythos 5 will beat it on capability, both at coding and at everything else. And the world is always hungry for more capabilities. If you're running high on agentic…

I'm not a very smart person, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I think the path forward will have agents that use models that are individually specialized tasks (some might use a bigger model, some might use smaller models), then orchestrators that are good at knowing when to use which agent type. I've played around with this in my own tiny coding agents, for TTRPG NPCs, and even a small experiment where LLMs…

"Orchestrator" pattern, "only use a big model to do big thinking, use smaller models to do grunt work" is probably what the field would converge to, eventually. Perhaps in form of "dynamic sparsity" - i.e. a family of closely related models allowing inference to transition from 1B class to 100T class on a dime, complete with something like joint KV cache.

But it's a hard pattern to pull off, so I'm not sure how soon we'll see it in action.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#48

Post by mystraline »

dag100 wrote: post #33
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generating huge consumer surpluses as a business strategy? Awesome if true.

Err, yes, until the surplus kills off all other competition and allows the supplier to jack prices up sky high, or otherwise bend consumers to their will. There's a reason most countries will stop foreign firms from doing this to them.

In this case, its not competition in the form of foreign company.

Its competition of engineers, scientists, and intellectual labor being atrophied due to overuse of LLM.

Pushing costs at 1/100 for 'thinking' gets intellectual labor people hooked and dependent. Then when costs go 300x, leaves people dumber and less capable of doing things on their own.

LLM companies, by not accurately charging for services, are directly dumping on world-level society and devaluing and addicting people to outsource thinking. Thats the problem.

In reality all subsidized and 'free' services do exactly this. LLM token vendors are making a play against human thought.

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#49

Post by lelanthran »

cranium wrote: post #37

I don't understand why simonw's comment is dead, because he mentions a real counterpoint to the video: API token prices are NOT the raw costs for any provider. I'd even say that inference needs to have quite a juicy margin to cover for all the other costs. It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of reve…

> It would make no business sense to sell API tokens at a loss: nobody knows yet how to price intelligence, so why start in the red when it's the only source of revenue?

All VC funded businesses start selling in the red. What makes you think these ones are going to be different?

Re: The $15,000 AI Bill. Your $20 Subscription is a DELUSION [video]

#50

Post by joshstrange »

Are frontier labs providing subscriptions at discount vs API token costs? Yes

However this entire video is slop. I don't know if it's actually AI slop but it's intellectual slop for sure.

Just the title alone is 100% disqualifying. They are using a monthly cost compared to the yearly [0] cost and also using the API token cost as the actual cost to the providers (which it's not, the actual cost is lower, the APIs, from everything we know, are _not_ being operated at a loss).

This whole video is a waste of your time. It's true that we are probably in Uber-phase of LLMs however a massive difference this time around is local inference (and other "open" models). If (US) frontier labs raise their prices then people can reach for the open models locally or using other cloud inference. And all of this assumes a moat, which so far doesn't seem to exist. The open models trail SOTA but not by more than a year or so (I've heard 6mo thrown around a lot).

Either the SOTA models will be priced too high to be worth it and we will move to open/lower-cost (local or otherwise) models or they will continue to provide a benefit over then lower/free models and be worth paying for.

[0] With _zero_ evidence to back up that number

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