Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well the third party operators on open router are assuredly operating at a profit, including depreciation They don't train new models. They have to depreciate their GPUs, which I hope they do.
I agree inference probably isn’t profitable yet if you include training costs. My claim is that marginal revenue from inference is higher than marginal cost. If that’s the case then if they scale enough the training costs will be amortized. I realize I said assuredly when I meant assumedly. My mistake. I agree it’s possible that the third party open model hosters aren’t actually profitable, my claim does rest on the…
AI's Affordability Crisis
391–400 of 436 posts
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I don't understand is why some companies are so stingy on AI token usage. If you're paying an engineer $X and they're getting 3x the amount of work done you should be happy paying up to $2X in AI tool usage. In reality many companies start complaining at their employees when they hit $0.1*X or less.
I hesitate to say this because I think the AI hype is generally overdone, but I was contemplating the other day how much I would recommend my employer spend on AI tooling for me based on my salary and it's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per year if I'm being honest. I'm a contractor. On my most recent client, I was able to learn a completely new domain and business, design a solution and build a full s…
But did you do it well? It’s not a snack, but a question based on general observation that every is praising the process, but no comment on the outcome.
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hesitate to say this because I think the AI hype is generally overdone, but I was contemplating the other day how much I would recommend my employer spend on AI tooling for me based on my salary and it's got to be in the tens of thousands of dollars per year if I'm being honest. I'm a contractor. On my most recent client, I was able to learn a completely new domain and business, design a solution and build a full s…
For consulting, sure. Most of the work is hitting the ground running and figuring out the old tech stacks, creating PoCs and then moving them to production and them moving on to the next "engagement". I think the problem is more for long lived projects and developers as regular employees. As you keep working on the product, you should be developing your own mental model of everything: business, tech stack, how the co…
After arriving at a seemingly workable design it helps spot oversights I've made either directly or by providing a stand in for a person to walk though the logic with (unlike a real person it doesn't become annoyed or impatient). Then it magically materializes any and all boilerplate along with 90% of the solution near instantaneously.
Yeah it confidently makes some truly bizarre errors that no half competent person ever would. Failing to go over the output with a fine toothed comb is inevitably leaving landmines in place. But I agree with you that your own mental model is required - if you have that then you will be able to spot the pitfalls assuming you actually put in the effort to read the output and really think about it instead of skimming. (As an example an LLM recently materialized an nftables filter chain for me that would have taken me quit a while to figure out on my own but for no apparent reason omitted a single key detail that would have completely broken all networking if it had been used blindly.)
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean.. get into it! Isn't it much more interesting for you to defend the real world strength of your argument than it is to just gotcha the article? It's highly relevant to all of this either way. Don't leave us hanging!
I promise to do it if you agree that the one of the foundational arguments of the article is itself false. And it’s not a gotcha at all. Once we agree on this, it could be worth discussing further.
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean.. get into it! Isn't it much more interesting for you to defend the real world strength of your argument than it is to just gotcha the article? It's highly relevant to all of this either way. Don't leave us hanging!
I promise to do it if you agree that the one of the foundational arguments of the article is itself false. And it’s not a gotcha at all. Once we agree on this, it could be worth discussing further.
The historical precedent on being able to capture value of a raw technology is not good. This is why the joke they promised us flying cars and we got ads.
So everyone says “Anthropic is like Uber”. But Uber is a service with people, not an underlying technology with commodity economics.
So in order for OpenAI and Anthropic to succeed (not google they have businesses to subsidize AI). LLMs would have to be the first technology where the businesses can capture value of the underlying technology itself.
So while I would concede that affordability is vulnerable to multiple angles of attack, I think that profitability is as well.
So what makes AI different than all previous technologies?
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do a lot of client work for fortune 100’s. Over the last month I have seen companies scrambling to measure deliverables against cost. Most of the back room talk is to the affect of giving devs a small allowance ($500 a month) and then making them prove their own productivity increases (again, based on deliverables, not LoC) before they either take it away or give them more. Obviously this won’t be on an individual…
The AI companies will be profitable if they ship the goods. Make AGI and companies will pay for it.
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The models get cheaper super fast. By this time next year Fable 5 will cost less than Sonnet does today. I'm not sure that's something to rely on. I would be Fable 5 will be phased out and the bleeding edge will be priced up.
I don't know about everyone else, but if you told me that for the next couple of years I, and everyone else, would have only Opus 4.5, I wouldn't exactly cry about it. Especially if in the meantime it got cheaper and maybe a bit faster. My desire for the latest and greatest continues on, but my need for it in order to get any value out of it at all is much, much smaller. The in-practice delta between all the versions…
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear energy is really cheap too... as long as you ignore CapEx, would you like to invest?
Marginal cost of nuclear is huge. Marginal cost of inference is much smaller. Capex in nuclear isn’t a fixed cost, it is the marginal cost.
The point I'm making is that claiming that AI labs would be profitable if only they could stop spending money on the only thing that makes them valuable is absurd. Frontier models are like a nuclear power plant that needs to be rebuilt from scratch every 24 months.
Let's say that they paused R&D a year ago. It's June 2026, OpenAI's latest offering is GPT 4.1, Codex is still just a private beta that hasn't been updated in months. How much revenue do you think they would be making right now? My guess is approximately zero.
[1] https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US govt is going to ban foreign models and foreign providers, and frontier labs are still cooked, because US companies will RLwash Chinese models to try and get in on the captive market. The frontier labs have already lost the war for coding, their next play is custom models for specific domains... Anthropic Galen for biomedical research, Anthropic Locke for legal analysis, etc, and you won't see _ANY_ intermedia…
> The US govt is going to ban foreign models The people have a right to make and use whatever models they want, protected by the constitution. At a minimum, the models are described in research papers that are unquestionably protected speech. Skilled devs turn those into programs, also protected speech.
Re: AI's Affordability Crisis
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is all still going on at my company but they’ve been trying to create dashboards to measure us as good or bad with our output unsuccessfully but they keep shoving it through anyways. It’s demoralized a lot of people.
> It’s demoralized a lot of people Isn't this a good thing? Doesn't it mean your company doesn't want employees to treat LLMs like a slot machines?