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Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

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Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#71

Post by motbus3 »

user_7832 wrote: post #57
motbus3 wrote: post #20

With no details, a bird told me of a project which estimated using several millions of tokens per day to automate a team work which got laid off. The operation is now a mess, there is no one willing to be considered liable and since the cheap model they used is about to be retired the company is going to see a 4x increase in price at least. I have the feeling that the age of 'i can't be blamed by AI stuff' will be a…

On the topic of older (Claude) models being better... anyone knows anything close to 3.5 (or 3.6) era Sonnet? It was by far the best LLM I had ever asked my doubts too. It actually explained in a human way, not like some AI I need to re read thrice to understand. (I've used modern Gemini 3.1 pro & claude too. Modern ChatGPT is just as useless, I've never heard a human speak in points. The human brain never encounters…

It is hard to say because there is "affection" memory that it was better than what we had before so it seems it was better.

In my humble opinion that serves nothing, it improved gradually, not exponentially up to 4.5

4.6 seems to be a minor step and the latest 2 are pure rubbish

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#72

Post by motbus3 »

prodigycorp wrote: post #50
motbus3 wrote: post #20

With no details, a bird told me of a project which estimated using several millions of tokens per day to automate a team work which got laid off. The operation is now a mess, there is no one willing to be considered liable and since the cheap model they used is about to be retired the company is going to see a 4x increase in price at least. I have the feeling that the age of 'i can't be blamed by AI stuff' will be a…

To me this is clearly a skill issue. Several millions of tokens per day is peanuts, even if uncached. gpt-5.5 is $5 per million of input tokens. Anybody doing things seriously understand how to optimize their workflows for smaller models once they start to lock in processes.

You talk without even knowing what the thing is about. It is easy peasy to spend millions of tokens per minute if you have the content for it.

This is not about you chatting with your char gpt window for sure.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#73

Post by motbus3 »

prodigycorp wrote: post #56
zozbot234 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The expensive tokens are output, not input. A useful rule of thumb is that a million tokens per day means about ~10 tok/s on a 24/7 basis.

Even then, i highly doubt any sort of automation is producing on the order of several millions of tokens daily. The issue I see with the org in parent comment seems to stem from management and not any sort of token repricing.

I can't say more. But it is totally possible.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#74

Post by motbus3 »

platinumrad wrote: post #45
motbus3 wrote: post #20

With no details, a bird told me of a project which estimated using several millions of tokens per day to automate a team work which got laid off. The operation is now a mess, there is no one willing to be considered liable and since the cheap model they used is about to be retired the company is going to see a 4x increase in price at least. I have the feeling that the age of 'i can't be blamed by AI stuff' will be a…

I don't doubt that the operation as a whole is a disaster, but they should be able to avoid the price increase by using one of the many other cheap models like DeepSeek V4 Flash right?

Deepseek V4 flash and pro are insanely good. Even it was for the same price

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#75

Post by worldsayshi »

mrweasel wrote: post #54
lenkite wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do need to start making money, but I don't think anyone has a plan as to how they are going to do this. Doesn't this just mean price increase ? What is not clear is how much the price needs to increase for AI companies to break even some time. 3x increase ? 10x increase ? Even more ? No one seems willing to give a clear number.

You can only increase the price so much. With every price increase you're going to lose customers, which could lead to further price increases. I'm not entirely convince that the AI companies can raise prices and keep enough of their customer base to make their current strategy commercially viable. They could also lower their production cost, but that runs counter to building/buying new datacenter capacity. Realistic…

Realistically they can't go that much above the actual cost for inference since the customer can always switch to self hosted or inference only providers. Or their models have to be significantly better than the open source models for the foreseeable future. They will never be able to charge much more for their lower tier models.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#76

Post by owebmaster »

lenkite wrote: post #40
mrweasel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea probably was to pour billions into technologies powering these LLMs, and gain a moat. It then turns out that this isn't as hard a problem as expected, it's just very expensive. So as long as you have money, you can be an AI company, the money is the moat (unless you take a shortcut, like DeepSeek) and money is running out. I don't think you're missing anything, but I am surprised that the forces behind the A…

> They do need to start making money, but I don't think anyone has a plan as to how they are going to do this. Doesn't this just mean price increase ? What is not clear is how much the price needs to increase for AI companies to break even some time. 3x increase ? 10x increase ? Even more ? No one seems willing to give a clear number.

> Doesn't this just mean price increase ?

Have you heard about Deepseek? In a world were it (and other Chinese open models) didn't exist, OpenAI and Anthropic would be profitable already

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#77

Post by owebmaster »

lukas221 wrote: post #19

it's simple, how much dollars you get out for every dollar put into tokens as Jensen said, get ready for $1000 per mil token those for which this price makes sense will push out those for which it doesn't - to lower models or to local models but those who want to run local models need to compete for hardware with the data centers, which have strong scale effects thus will always be able to out price local hardware al…

You are hallucinating, my friend.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#78

Post by mrweasel »

owebmaster wrote: post #76
lenkite wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They do need to start making money, but I don't think anyone has a plan as to how they are going to do this. Doesn't this just mean price increase ? What is not clear is how much the price needs to increase for AI companies to break even some time. 3x increase ? 10x increase ? Even more ? No one seems willing to give a clear number.

> Doesn't this just mean price increase ? Have you heard about Deepseek? In a world were it (and other Chinese open models) didn't exist, OpenAI and Anthropic would be profitable already

> In a world were it (and other Chinese open models) didn't exist, OpenAI and Anthropic would be profitable already

How so? The existence of e.g. DeepSeek doesn't lower the cost for OpenAI. OpenAI have almost a billion users, or so they claim. Adding even another billion users isn't going to help them, unless they can keep cost under control.

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#79

Post by red-iron-pine »

vineyardmike wrote: post #41
tabs_or_spaces wrote: post #29

For me it depends on who you listen to If you're following a bunch of people who are from LLM labs, you're going to be more incentivised to tokenmaxx because it's in the Lab's best interest tonget you to behave that way. Practically, many companies aren't labs with endless runway. Companies hopefully follow a PnL model. And when you look at things with that lens, many of the times the LLM use case falls apart. You're…

I'll take the contrary position and say that I think the "tokenmaxxing" we've previously seen was useful (but shouldn't continue indefinitely). My TLDR position is that TokenMaxxing was a way to force discovery of Product Market Fit. The push by companies to incorporate AI into everything is (depending on the company) either hype and cargo-culting or it was an attempt by management to (1) try and discover if/what new…

> The push by companies to incorporate AI into everything is (depending on the company) either hype and cargo-culting or it was an attempt by management to (1) try and discover if/what new workflows or tools could use it and (2) force the haters to use as it got better.

"we need to figure out if we can replace you with AI, or if it just extends your abilities"

Re: Is This the Dawn of the Tokenpocalypse?

#80

Post by red-iron-pine »

dwattttt wrote: post #39
unglaublich wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What physical limitation will dictate that we can't have 1B tokens for cheap?

Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress

the first law of thermodynamics is you do not talk about thermodynamics
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