Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

sutro.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#51

Post by refulgentis »

This is a marketing blog[^1], written with AI[^2], heavily sensationalized, & doesn't understand much in the first place.

We don't have accurate price signals externally because Google, in particular, had been very aggressive at treating pricing as a competition exercise than anything that seemed tethered to costs.

For quite some time, their pricing updates would be across-the-board exactly 2/3 of the cost of OpenAI's equivalent mode.

[^1] "If you’re building batch tasks with LLMs and are looking to navigate this new cost landscape, feel free to reach out to see how Sutro can help."

[^2] "Google's decision to raise the price of Gemini 2.5 Flash wasn't just a business decision; it was a signal to the entire market." by far the biggest giveaway, the other tells are repeated fanciful descriptions of things that could be real, that when stacked up, indicate a surreal, artifical, understanding of what they're being asked to write about, i.e. "In a move that at first went unnoticed,"

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#52

Post by FirmwareBurner »

throwawayoldie wrote: post #13
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't all LLMs loosing money at this point?

Yes, and the obvious endgame is wait until most software development is effectively outsourced to them, then jack the prices to whatever they want. The Uber model.

Good thing AI can't replace my drinking during work time skills

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#53

Post by checker659 »

fathermarz wrote: post #47

Google is raising prices for most of their services. I do not agree that this is due to the cost of compute or that this is the end of Moore’s Law. I don’t think we have scratched the surface.

> cost of compute

DRAM scaling + interconnect bandwidth stagnation

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#54

Post by mossTechnician »

simonw wrote: post #10
sharkjacobs wrote: post #4

> This is the first time a major provider has backtracked on the price of an established model Arguably that was Haiku 3.5 in October 2024. I think the same hypothesis could apply though, that you price your model expecting a certain average input size, and then adjust price up to accommodate the reality that people use that cheapest model when they want to throw as much as they can into the context.

Haiku 3.5 was a completely different model from Haiku 3, and part of a new model generation. Gemini Flash 2.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview were presumably a whole lot more similar to each other.

Is there an expectation Haiku 3.5 is completely different? Even leaving semantic versioning aside, even if the .5 symbolizes a "halfway point" between major releases, it still suggests a non-major release to me.

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#55

Post by furyofantares »

fnord123 wrote: post #43
furyofantares wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely theorycrafted but I see this as an excellent thing driving AI forward, not holding it back. I suspect a large part of the reason we've had many decades of exponential improvements in compute is the general purpose nature of computers. It's a narrow set of technologies that are universally applicable and each time they get better/cheaper they find more demand, so we've put an exponentially increasing…

They aren't arguing against LLMs They are arguing against their toaster's LLM to make the perfect toast from being trained on the tax policies of the Chang Dynasty.

I'm aware! And I'm personally excited about small models but my intuition is that maybe pouring more and more money into giant general purpose models will have payoff as long as it keeps working at producing better general purpose results (which maybe it won't).

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#56

Post by YetAnotherNick »

Pricing != Cost.

One of the clearest example is Deepseek v3. Deepseek has mentioned its price of 0.27/1.10 has 80% profit margin, so it cost them 90% lesser than the price of Gemini flash. And Gemini flash is very likely smaller model than Deepseek v3.

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#57

Post by simonw »

mossTechnician wrote: post #54
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haiku 3.5 was a completely different model from Haiku 3, and part of a new model generation. Gemini Flash 2.5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview were presumably a whole lot more similar to each other.

Is there an expectation Haiku 3.5 is completely different? Even leaving semantic versioning aside, even if the .5 symbolizes a "halfway point" between major releases, it still suggests a non-major release to me.

Consumers have no idea what Haiku is.

Engineers who work with LLM APIs are hopefully paying enough attention that they understand the difference between Claude 3, Claude 3.5 and Claude 4.

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#58

Post by impure »

> In a move that at first went unnoticed

Oh, I noticed. I've also complained how Gemini 2.0 Flash is 50% more expensive than Gemini 1.5 Flash for small requests.

Also I'm sure if Google wanted to price Gemini 2.5 Flash cheaper they could. The reason they won't is because there is almost zero competition at the Also the quadratic increase is valid but it's not as simple as the article states due to caching. And if it was a bit issue Google would impose tiered pricing like they do for Gemini 2.5 Pro.

And for what it's worth I've been playing around with Gemma E4B on together.ai. It takes 10x as long as Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite and it sucks at multilingual. But other than that it seems to produce acceptable results and is way cheaper.

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#59

Post by antirez »

I think providers are making a mistake in simplifying prices at all costs, hiding the quadratic nature of attention. People can understand the pricing anyway, even if more complex, by having a tool that let them select a prompt and a reply length and see the cost, or fancy 3D graphs that capture the cost surface of different cases. People would start sending smaller prompts and less context when less is enough, and what they pay would be more related to the amount of GPU/TPU/... power they use.

Re: The End of Moore's Law for AI? Gemini Flash Offers a Warning

#60

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #57
mossTechnician wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an expectation Haiku 3.5 is completely different? Even leaving semantic versioning aside, even if the .5 symbolizes a "halfway point" between major releases, it still suggests a non-major release to me.

Consumers have no idea what Haiku is. Engineers who work with LLM APIs are hopefully paying enough attention that they understand the difference between Claude 3, Claude 3.5 and Claude 4.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN