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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

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Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#8

Post by wsun19 »

greenmilk wrote: post #4

Are any inference providers currently making profit (on inference, I know google makes money)?

Pretty much every major American inference provider claims to make a profit on API-based inference. Consumer plans might be subsidized overall, but it's hard to say since they're a black box and some consumers don't fully use their plans

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#9

Post by quicklywilliam »

Interesting read. I don't know if I quite buy the evidence, but it's definitely enough to warrant further investigation. It also matches up with my personal experience, which is that tools like Claude Code are burning through more and more tokens as we push them to do bigger and bigger work. But we all know the frontier model companies are burning through money in an unsustainable race to get you and your company hooked on their tools.

So: I buy that the cost of frontier performance is going up exponentially, but that doesn't mean there is a fundamental link. We also know that benchmark performance of much smaller/cheaper models has been increasing (as far as I know METR only looks at frontier models), so that makes me wonder if the exponential cost/time horizon relationship is only for the frontier models.

Re: Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

#10

Post by agentifysh »

Until there is some drastic new hardware, we are going to see a similar situation to proof of work, where a small group hordes the hardware and can collude on prices.

Difference is that the current prices have a lot of subsidies from OPM

Once the narrative changes to something more realistic, I can see prices increase across the board, I mean forget $200/month for codex pro, expect $1000/month or something similar.

So its a race between new supply of hardware with new paradigm shifts that can hit market vs tide going out in the financial markets.

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