What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#21

Post by Balooga » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

Jevons Paradox [1]

> when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.

I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#22

Post by andai » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper

I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me".

I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#23

Post by nchmy » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

I've been working with the chinese open models for 4 months. They are more than capable for a tiny fraction of the cost of the frontier ones. And yet they also continue to get significantly better and (Deepseek's recent price increase aside) cheaper. Its hard to fathom how the truly frontier stuff will be able to compete long-term.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#24

Post by LordHumungous » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper in a field, every record in an archive, every email, or every message in a support queue as a matter of routine

Pretty much already happening

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#25

Post by bellowsgulch » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #22

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me". I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

Futurama did it first!

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#26

Post by jostmey » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

nchmy wrote: post #23

I've been working with the chinese open models for 4 months. They are more than capable for a tiny fraction of the cost of the frontier ones. And yet they also continue to get significantly better and (Deepseek's recent price increase aside) cheaper. Its hard to fathom how the truly frontier stuff will be able to compete long-term.

And why won’t the frontier models continue to become better? The open models are getting better but so are the frontier models. The frontier models might remain in a constant race to remain ahead

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#27

Post by perching_aix » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

Balooga wrote: post #21

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…

Sounds like a variation on the induced demand principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

- Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio...

And I pretty much just plain agree, this is exactly what will happen.

I don't think there's anything wrong with it (in isolation) either, though I do already find myself pointing out that we're misusing LLMs at work sometimes (most notably, a recent mini project could have been a jinja template - and it did become one thanks to me pushing back on this). Abundance is one thing, waste and misuse is another.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#28

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #12

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #3

I think a big one is robotics. A robot can today fold your laundry. It takes ~10mins per item. Seriously. It takes a long time to process the image find the corner move the claw to the corner of the shirt and attempt to straighten before folding. Robots right now generally move at glacial speeds. You might have seen robots doing flips in semi controlled environments but watch how slowly they open doors etc. processin…

You must not have been paying attention to development with robots, there are many videos of robots moving really fast in "non controlled environments"

Honestly, most of the videos I've seen of robots moving around quickly aren't actually doing anything useful. We've had really impressive tech demos for the past 15 years of robots dancing and jumping around. But I don't want a dancing robot, I want a robot to make me a BLT, wash my dishes, take out the trash, and fold my laundry.

The most recent video which actually impressed me was a demonstration from Gemini Robotics 2, where a robot was shown autonomously removing the bag from a trash can and folding the loops closed in real time.

I don't follow robotics advances closely so it's possible I'm just ignorant, do you know any autonomous robotics demonstrations of useful activities that you would suggest checking out?

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#29

Post by newAccount2025 » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

I’m loving small models. The gemma4 26/31b models have been deeply impressive on weird prose analysis tasks that I am working on. Nova-micro is really stupid but is extremely fast when it’s smart enough to do something. I’m trying to be disciplined about able to evaluate quality vs cost everywhere for real systems built on this stuff. I probably need to get off Bedrock because it’s missing a lot of other little models that might be good competitors.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#30

Post by andai » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

bkd9 wrote: post #2

Author here. I made these plots because I had been searching for them for months and never found quite what I wanted: how the cheapest way to reach a fixed capability level has moved over time. Artificial Analysis publishes enough data to reconstruct it. If someone knows of a source that already tracks this, with historical prices, please share.

Thanks for the effort you put into this.

I wonder if it might drive the point even further if the graph scales were linear? Or maybe the progress has been so great that this would make the graphs unreadable?

https://xkcd.com/1162