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AI is too expensive

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Re: AI is too expensive

#41

Post by bensyverson »

neals wrote: post #38
bensyverson wrote: post #13

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

Token cost will come down in the future, it might even out

It's hard to predict the future, but it seems likely that flagship tokens will become more expensive, but many people will use free tokens via local inference.

Re: AI is too expensive

#42

Post by pingou »

The end goal of these companies is AGI, or even ASI. If you believe this is around the corner, and think AI can do the job of a human for less money, it makes sense to put all your money into working towards that goal and buying as much compute as you can. This is especially true since whoever gets there first (or is simply ahead and can use their AI to get even better) gets a big advantage.

Re: AI is too expensive

#43

Post by skybrian »

I’m paying API prices for my hobby coding due to the coding agent I use. So far I’ve switched from Opus to Sonnet to GLM 5.1. Looks like it’s about 25% of the cost and quality seems good enough so far.

I think competition is going to keep customer costs low if you’re willing to switch. Maybe people on expense accounts won’t care, though?

Re: AI is too expensive

#44

Post by sophacles »

simianwords wrote: post #6

If AI is too costly: bubble will burst because costs are unsustainable. If AI is too cheap: bubble will burst because you can run them locally and data centrs are not needed. If is it in-between, AI companies make too much money and they make too much profit which is bad! I don't think this guy is a serious commentator.

This isn't an accurate summary, even at a 50Kft view. Are you a serious commentator?

Re: AI is too expensive

#46

Post by giancarlostoro »

changoplatanero wrote: post #16

Imagine you were looking at Google, a sustainable and profitable business, and you thought you saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to compete with them and take their position as a leading tech company. How much money would you need to spend to make a credible attempt? Google has had decades to accumulate intellectual and physical capital. Catching up quickly means spending >500 billion. If you can actually dethrone…

Meanwhile Meta / Mark Zuck is in crisis mode trying to come up with some meaningful way to break into AI, instead of competing in what's currently hot, they'll probably remake Elons weird persona system, which is not exactly the hottest thing on the planet, and billions down the drain that could have gone into building more efficient LLMs instead.

Re: AI is too expensive

#47

Post by skybrian »

bensyverson wrote: post #13

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

For Uber, paying the driver is unavoidable (for now) so this isn’t a good comparison at all.

A better comparison is with how much PC costs went down during the 80’s due to IBM clones and Moore’s law.

Re: AI is too expensive

#48

Post by eieiewq »

Aurornis wrote: post #37
bensyverson wrote: post #13

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

Uber is a good comparison because everyone was predicting the demise of ride sharing as soon as they tried to become profitable. The subsidies went away gradually and the prices leveled out in a spot where the services are heavily used. Uber became profitable. Ride sharing is affordable. I think our $20/month plans might become a little less generous and the $200/month plan won’t always allow non-stop vibe coding, bu…

No it’s a bad example as uber had solid unit economics. Uber is more Akin to Amazon.

Re: AI is too expensive

#49

Post by ethagnawl »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #46
changoplatanero wrote: post #16

Imagine you were looking at Google, a sustainable and profitable business, and you thought you saw a once in a lifetime opportunity to compete with them and take their position as a leading tech company. How much money would you need to spend to make a credible attempt? Google has had decades to accumulate intellectual and physical capital. Catching up quickly means spending >500 billion. If you can actually dethrone…

Meanwhile Meta / Mark Zuck is in crisis mode trying to come up with some meaningful way to break into AI, instead of competing in what's currently hot, they'll probably remake Elons weird persona system, which is not exactly the hottest thing on the planet, and billions down the drain that could have gone into building more efficient LLMs instead.

> billions down the drain that could have gone into building more efficient LLMs instead.

Or any one of thousands of other ventures which could be more beneficial to humanity, the environment, etc.

Re: AI is too expensive

#50

Post by giancarlostoro »

bensyverson wrote: post #13

If you're older than 30, you've seen this play out before… This is just how the VC game works. Cross-town Uber rides don't stay $5 forever. The bright side is: this is a golden era of subsidized tokens. It will not always be like this, so now is the time to churn out your passion projects.

I mean SubQ claims to reason as good as the frontier models, not better, but reasonably as good, and is 5x cheaper, so the future might not be all in on overpriced LLMs. Data science devs don't engineer for scalable performance, they engineer for the model's capabilities first and foremost.

SubQ was validated by at least one third party, not sure if we'll see more confirmation, but 5x cheaper costs is worth it. None of the frontier models care enough about cutting costs of their models, only being the best in benchmarks.

https://subq.ai/

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