Is not one or the other. AI is a tool for the Engineer. Costs more? Depends on how you use it. You can reduce AI costs in multiple ways, accepting the tradeoffs.
When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
41–50 of 128 posts
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#42I think that token usage by engineers continues to increase, probably at a very high rate for many years (we are in the middle of the S curve of adoption and it isn’t yet clear where this will plateaux) but an increasing percentage of those tokens are cheap, because we use expensive models for goals and design and cheap models for implementations and workflows.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#43Open-weight models are going to completely shatter these forecasts. It takes a little more effort – right now, probably won’t be true in three months – but you can achieve the same at 1/10th of the cost.
> but you can achieve the same at 1/10th of the cost. For some tasks, sure. But not for all tasks. And for some tasks, cost per token is irrelevant if it provides real benefits that are oom compared to what you had. Local models are indeed becoming "good enough" for some tasks, but there are still tasks that they can't touch. There's a recent benchmark for kernel writing. Fable wrote a kernel that provides ~30% more…
That’s true, there will always be demand for ultra-intelligent assistants, especially if they surpass what humans can achieve at similar cost. For the other 90%, the average frontier model will be good enough.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#44Garbage. You choose to pay that money, it doesn’t have to cost that much. You have a choice and choose the priciest option, “because shiny”.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#45Garbage. You can't include training by the companies that develop an llm in the comparison against companies that merely use the same llm. Apples and potatoes.
I guess they should include tuition cost as well.
In a way in US it is - _IF_ ppl were rational economic agents and free market allocation worked student loans should reflect on the wages too.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it still makes sense to pay for the LLM Enterprise subscriptions. Does it though? I do not see any advantages in my day to day job over using the cheaper models.
My company has a Claude Code and Codex one and I use Claude Code because I am more familiar with it. That said, I just use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation and it's pretty cheap. Codex seems decent too so I should try it out some more. But you can get an awful lot done even with just like $200 a month at API pricing if you are careful not to waste a powerful model on an easy task, or carry around a blo…
With cheaper models I really meant cheaper subscriptions but used the wrong vocabulary. We still use Claude Opus (if thats what 4.6 is?). We just have the 20 bucks subscription and I barely use up my token limits in my day to day work.
I often wonder what kinda features other devs implement compared to me, if they need that many tokens?
It kind of feels impractical to bloat up an app with features one barely understands? I've just been reading about these devs using x-amount of tokens, having that y-amount of steps perfected AI workflow, but none of them ever talk about what they actually implement all day...
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
So where are these training costs getting paid from?
VC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.
That's about to change: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
Anthropic was profitable last quarter.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#48Mr. Mark Zuckerberg is particularly not happy about these stats. He was promised something else and he has already fired like half of the company. It is really crazy people didn't think this through.
Mark Zuckerberg‘s and Meta’s incompetence should have been recognized after the metaverse debacle.
They were lucky with the ad empire he built and that‘s it.
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#49Mr. Mark Zuckerberg is particularly not happy about these stats. He was promised something else and he has already fired like half of the company. It is really crazy people didn't think this through.
I think its a fallacy to believe people like Zuckerberg or any other stupidly rich person aren't extremely calculative about this. I am very sure they have surrounded themselves by top tier engineers making very informed decisions while their top tier marketing teams make very calculated decisions on how its expressed to the public. The public generally is NOT in favor of AI outside of tech circles so it makes sense…
Are you really saying that Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of "Meta", can't make a massive miscalculation?
Re: When AI Costs More Than the Engineer
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
So where are these training costs getting paid from?
VC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.
I wonder if they ever will be. If the chinese open source models are only 3-6 months behind every major frontier model release, I can't see the business model. GLM-5.2 is supposedly on par to Opus depending on the case. And everybody and their mother can run that model in their datacenter and charge Dollars for tokens.