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What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

catalystneuro.com

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

#61

Post by brabel »

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.

It blows my mind how fast models are getting better and this is the first article I’ve seen that shows just that and leaves almost no room for disagreement. Well done.

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

#62

Post by Flamkuchlo »

bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #15

Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds. That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for…

Sooooo what does it matter if we do 99% of things a LLM can just solve as a 'advanced search engine'?

Btw. an advanced search engine is probably the worst comparision i have read so far.

A LLM is a latent space which is capable of a lot of things a search engine can't do. It can apply different type of patterns and flows onto data, it can combine these etc.

My 'advanced search engine' was just able to create a working PR for exactly what i wanted it to solve (fixing a bug) by analysing the bug, finding a valid solution then commiting the solution itself.

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

#64

Post by Flamkuchlo »

qsera wrote: post #5

Idiocy becomes rampant!

Whats your problem?

Even if its not intelligence, a LLM found a bug due to one error message, fixed it, created a PR and it solved it.

If an LLM is only able to do all of this after training on it and never achieving AGI, we already at the point were it is cheaper to teach one LLM one problem than teaching humans to do so.

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

#65

Post by conjecTech »

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…

Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of overall consumption. Las Vegas may have, but that is a very small part of overall usage.

I anticipate we will see something similar with intelligence. There is probably headroom to consume 100x as much intelligence in R&D. But that isn't most of the economy. Will run of the mill service jobs increase their use of intelligence by enough to offset the effect of cheaper prices? I think that's the real question.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by imnotr0b0t »

The article is solid. But there is a nuance what he skipped — quality vs price. Sure, GPT-5.6 Luna for pennies can do the same thing what Claude 4.5 Sonnet did for a dollar a year ago. Except Sonnet back then actually carried the codebase, while Luna... eh, not so much. And another thing, speed. You can make it cheaper as much as you want, but if a model thinks for half a minute you save cents but lose time.

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

#70

Post by fabsalvadori »

There is a second-order effect I see, here: when generating work becomes dramatically cheaper, failed work also becomes dramatically more common.

With coding agents, cheap intelligence doesn't just mean producing the same software for less, but rather trying five implementations, letting agents run longer, touching larger scopes, and supervising fewer intermediate steps.

That changes which infrastructure matters. When attempts are expensive, you optimize for success, while when attempts are cheap, you start optimizing for how cheaply you can inspect, reject and recover from failure.

Git was an enormous enabler of cheap human experimentation, and I suspect we'll end up building analogous primitives around autonomous work.

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