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Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

aditya.patadia.org

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Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#171

Post by jijijijij »

usef- wrote: post #155
rimliu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People claim what they see. I see no improvement since opus 4.6, quite the opossite.

That's only a few months old. Just because there's time between big releases doesn't mean progress stopped. Fable seemed very clearly a step up in my one afternoon of usage. I gave it several bugs that other models had failed at repeatedly (in a mess of a vibe coded side project) and it fixed them each in one prompt.

> Just because there's time between big releases doesn't mean progress stopped.

No, but progress not stopping doesn't mean it's not plateauing. I believe 'plateauing' is understood as the process of approaching a plateau, not being stuck on a plateau already. So, the question is about the rate of progress, not its existence.

Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#172

Post by jijijijij »

LUmBULtERA wrote: post #170
jijijijij wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, but that's only a part of operational costs. A craftsman's revenue may exceed the electricity bill for the power drill, doesn't mean the business is sustainable.

Day 2 the craftsman has not made up for the investment/loss of their equipment. Not a useful example.

Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#174

Post by juleiie »

viktorcode wrote: post #29
juleiie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if that is wise. It’s a hostile superpower after all

DeepSeek first and foremost is a business. Yes, being a business in China means risk of being ordered tomorrow to do something that is not in your best interests. But now we know the US is not immune to that level of government oversight either. The difference is DeepSeek and other Chinese models are open weights.

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Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#175

Post by juleiie »

adrian_b wrote: post #97
juleiie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if that is wise. It’s a hostile superpower after all

By "hostile superpower" you mean USA? As an European, today I certainly classify USA as a "hostile superpower" because the actions from the last few years of both the US government and of certain big US companies have stolen a lot of money directly from my own pocket, by artificially limiting competition in several important markets, like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules, thus greatly raising the prices in compar…

[dead]

Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#176

Post by juleiie »

gck1 wrote: post #126
juleiie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if that is wise. It’s a hostile superpower after all

I'm in Europe. The only superpower that's been hostile to me, very directly - was US, when they asked a company I was relying on to limit model access based on nationality. China has (so far), never done that to me.

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Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#177

Post by maplethorpe »

Costs will continue to come down. That's how technology works. They will continue to come down further and further until they cross the threshold and become negative, and when that happens, instead of it costing you money to use GPT 5.5, you'll actually receive money! LLMs will become magic money generating machines, and I personally can't wait.

Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#179

Post by yturijea »

auggierose wrote: post #83
yturijea wrote: post #68

I am using perhaps 15% of usage count on Claude with just the normal subscription. And I do full time software engineering and would say I use quite a lot of AI input on thoughts, designs and code drafts. So how these companies and people manage to use these absurd amount of tokens is a mystery to me. It feels like this are just running huge amount of non-vetted data to the LLM's and or running loops against the LLM'…

What is a "normal" subscription? Are you using Claude Code, or just Claude??

Just Claude, I have seen the weird hallucinations these LLM's make, yes that also means opus, fable etc. so I don't trust it to just run its own clause.

Yes that also means I get to inspect and confirm every step of the way, to ensure the design is followed, we are not making unneccesary changes, we have thought about edge cases, testing etc. And I also keep an understanding of what is produced, because I will manually copy it in, I will manually read through it. I will do secondary review of it myself in PR's whatever.

But I guess a lot of people just don't and just blow claude code through the roof on ad libitum infinity loop?

On subscription, I just checked, I have the Pro Plan, which for Claude I believe is the equal of the normal one?

Re: Why current LLM costs are not sustainable

#180

Post by usef- »

jijijijij wrote: post #171
usef- wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only a few months old. Just because there's time between big releases doesn't mean progress stopped. Fable seemed very clearly a step up in my one afternoon of usage. I gave it several bugs that other models had failed at repeatedly (in a mess of a vibe coded side project) and it fixed them each in one prompt.

> Just because there's time between big releases doesn't mean progress stopped. No, but progress not stopping doesn't mean it's not plateauing. I believe 'plateauing' is understood as the process of approaching a plateau, not being stuck on a plateau already. So, the question is about the rate of progress, not its existence.

I guess we draw a different line then. This year has been full of a lot of great releases so far. Most normal people didn't even use Agents before January. It does not at all feel slower than previous years.

HN commenters have been saying that LLMs plateaued ever since the first ChatGPT release.

6 months ago:

> LLMs are amazing, but they have reached a plateau.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46109534

1 year ago:

> generative AI has languished in the same place, even in my kindest estimations, for several months, though it's really been years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43085885

2 years ago:

> 2024 has seen nothing substantially good and the only notesworthy thing is this article finally hitting into the public consciousness that we are past of the AI peak and beyond the plateau and freefalling has already begun.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42125888

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Many more that I haven't time to look up.

I think the present just always feels slow.

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