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AI's Affordability Crisis

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291–300 of 436 posts

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#291

Post by whimsicalism »

steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

I think this panic around overuse is largely just managers talking amongst themselves and everyone trying to see what everyone else is doing. It is frankly hard to interpret in any other way

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#292

Post by ilovecake1984 »

travisb wrote: post #158

I think a lot of the cost comparisons to employees are off by a factor of 2 or more. AI is the ultimate contractor. Available instantly. Doesn't charge during idle periods. Pre-vetted and pre-trained. No contract negotiations or complex accounting. That is worth a small multiple of the fully-loaded employee cost. So AI might be easily worth more than $200 per human-equivalent hour. With high utilization, that might b…

Agree. But if that’s the thinking then you need to compare vs off shore contract rates, not on shore contract rates.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#293

Post by steveBK123 »

qurren wrote: post #289
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

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.

Most companies are not seeing 2x or 3x of value produced from developers with AI is the reason

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#294

Post by whimsicalism »

qnleigh wrote: post #197

The estimate that AI companies need to replace 27% of jobs to service their debt is interesting. But at least Anthropic and Meta seem to have their eyes on replacing software engineers. There are ~1.6M software engineers on the US [0], earning a bit under 150k/year on average [1]. If AI companies captured all of that spend, that amounts to about 250B/year. The article assumed that they need around 300B/year to keep u…

obviating software engineers is effectively AGI-complete and entails obviating most labor in existence .

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#295

Post by VorpalWay »

dwaltrip wrote: post #260
akazantsev wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lol I feel like no one has any attention span here. Tech shit is expensive in the beginning when it's new. It gets cheaper with time. The funniest comment here. Have you seen the prices of the technical shit for the past two years? Dang, GPUs are not getting any cheaper, but more expensive with each year.

It’s a massive supply crunch. More production will come online.

Probably not, at least for DRAM. The demand has historically been very variable, and building production capacity takes multiple years. Also, spare capacity is really expensive. Thus the memory manufacturers don't want to expand, betting on it being yet another temporary bubble.

Also, DRAM fabs are not really usable to make compute (CPU, GPU, etc in this context) silicon. The production lines and tech have diverged some decades ago. So unlike TSMC which can relatively easily retool for another customer, no such luck for the big DRAM manufacturers.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#296

Post by simianwords »

whimsicalism wrote: post #288
simianwords wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very interesting how you are contradicting the whole article's axioms and then arriving at the same conclusion that we are in for a crash! Rational takeaway is to step back and analyse what's really happening here. - Are we really in for a crash? - What does it say about the culture and people's mental models that we have two radically opposing viewpoints on AI costs and people still arrive at same conclusion?

It's just schadenfreude/ressentiment. Our societal values are very christian even as we secularize and you can see this reflected everywhere you turn. Same thing with people feeling there ought to be a 'catch' to GLP1s, etc. etc.

I don't get you because I'm too stupid to parse your thoughts

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#297

Post by hdgvhicv »

wqaatwt wrote: post #264
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could Trump ban tiktok then? And Fable for that matter. Maybe you're somehow legally allowed to distribute and download the weights, but most of us can't run GLM 5.2 at home.

They “banned” the company, not the product. US government could ban US citizens from buying tokens from certain Chinese provider but there is no precedent for banning the usage of specific software if you run it yourself.

Decss

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#298

Post by ranyume »

sevenzero wrote: post #269
woeirua wrote: post #218

It's not an affordability crisis, it's a financial crisis. The models get cheaper super fast. By this time next year Fable 5 will cost less than Sonnet does today. That's not the problem. The problem is that many companies are going to realize that they don't get any ROI from AI. Generating code faster != more profit. Most of the Fortune 500 will likely realize this and then the token budgets will come crashing down.…

>The models get cheaper super fast. Weird, why didn't my subscriptions decrease in price then? Oh wait..

What do you mean? My deepseek subscription got really cheap.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#299

Post by simianwords »

mikgp wrote: post #147
simianwords wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Models are not commodities and are famously non fungible. Each model has its quirks and strengths, weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. I know because I see how people went over the 4o model. I can see opus behaving clearly differently enough that I pick it for certain tasks.

Is this really for comparable models though? Will folks at scale continue to choose Anthropic frontier AI model if OpenAI releases a similar generation at a 90% discount with comparable capabilities? It feels like the fungibility assumes delineation by capability _and_ cost. No one is choosing sonnet over opus at similar price points.

I could get into this line of debate that I find interesting but it doesn't contradict my point that the article itself is wrong and written on false assumptions.

Re: AI's Affordability Crisis

#300

Post by mkozlows »

Gigachad wrote: post #258
steveBK123 wrote: post #44

I think the biggest problem is not necessarily the cost to develop & serve the models, but how quickly user behavior changed with token based pricing. I know a lot of people at companies where the marching orders changed on a dime end of Q1/start of Q2. These are shops that were fully on the "use AI or die (because we will fire you)" train. Now there's monitoring, reporting, alerting not just on overall cost but on "…

Our company went from “AI AI AI” to “GitHub Copilot has been suspended due to exceeding the budget” with this month’s price increase.

If your company was giving you Copilot, they were never that far on board the AI train anyway.
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