Comment by fooker
9 hours ago
> It might become cheaper or it might not
If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper.
(But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)
9 hours ago
> It might become cheaper or it might not
If it does not, this is going to be first technology in the history of mankind that has not become cheaper.
(But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year)
> But anyway, it already costs half compared to last year
You could not have bought Claude Opus 4.5 at any price one year ago I'm quite certain. The things that were available cost half of what they did then, and there are new things available. These are both true.
I'm agreeing with you, to be clear.
There are two pieces I expect to continue: inference for existing models will continue to get cheaper. Models will continue to get better.
Three things, actually.
The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].
[0]: https://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2018/09/a-critical-appraisal-...
interesting post. i wonder if these people go back and introspect on how incorrect they have been? do they feel the need to address it?
No, people do not do that.
This is harmless when it comes to tech opinions but causes real damage in politics and activism.
People get really attached to ideals and ideas, and keep sticking to those after they fail to work again and again.
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Some people definitely do but how do they go and address it? A fresh example in that it addresses pure misinformation. I just screwed up and told some neighbors garbage collection was delayed for a day because of almost 2ft of snow. Turns out it was just food waste and I was distracted checking the app and read the notification poorly.
I went back to tell them (do not know them at all just everyone is chattier digging out of a storm) and they were not there. Feel terrible and no real viable remedy. Hope they check themselves and realize I am an idiot. Even harder on the internet.
Do _you_ do that?
As a user of LLMs since GPT-3 there was noticeable stagnation in LLM utility after the release of GPT-4. But it seems the RLHF, tool calling, and UI have all come together in the last 12 months. I used to wonder what fools could be finding them so useful to claim a 10x multiplier - even as a user myself. These days I’m feeling more and more efficiency gains with Claude Code.
> The "hitting a wall" / "plateau" people will continue to be loud and wrong. Just as they have been since 2018[0].
Everybody who bet against Moore's Law was wrong ... until they weren't.
And AI is the reaction to Moore's Law having broken. Nobody gave one iota of damn about trying to make programming easier until the chips couldn't double in speed anymore.
This is exactly backwards: Dennard scaling stopped. Moore’s Law has continued and it’s what made training and running inference on these models practical at interactive timescales.
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That's not true. Many technologies get more expensive over time, as labor gets more expensive or as certain skills fall by the wayside, not everything is mass market. Have you tried getting a grandfather clock repaired lately?
Repairing grandfather clocks isn't more expensive now because it's gotten any harder; it's because the popularity of grandfather clocks is basically nonexistent compared to anything else to tell time.
"repairing a unique clock" getting costlier doesn't mean technology hasn't gotten cheaper.
check out whether clocks have gotten cheaper in general. the answer is that it has.
there is no economy of scale here in repairing a single clock. its not relevant to bring it up here.
Clocks prices have gone up since 2020. Unless a cheaper better way to make clocks has emerged inflation causes prices to grow.
7 replies →
Instead of advancing tenuous examples you could suggest a realistic mechanism by which costs could rise, such as a Chinese advance on Taiwan, effecting TSMC, etc.
Time-keeping is vastly cheaper. People don't want grandfather clocks. They want to tell time. And they can, more accurately, more easily, and much cheaper than their ancestors.
No. You don't get to make "technology gets more expensive over time" statements for deprecated technologies.
Getting a bespoke flintstone axe is also pretty expensive, and has also absolutely no relevance to modern life.
These discussions must, if they are to be useful, center in a population experience, not in unique personal moments.
I purchased a 5T drive in 2019 and the price is higher now despite newer better drives going on the market since.
Not much has down in price over the last few years.
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okay how about the Francis Scott Key Bridge?
https://marylandmatters.org/2025/11/17/key-bridge-replacemen...
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Bought any RAM lately? Phone? GPU in the last decade?
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Or riding in an uber?
I don't think computation is going to become more expensive, but there are techs that have become so: Nuclear power plants. Mobile phones. Oil extraction.
(Oil rampdown is a survival imperative due to the climate catastrophe so there it's a very positive thing of course, though not sufficient...)
Sure, running an LLM is cheaper, but the way we use LLMs now requires way more tokens than last year.
10x more tokens today cost less than than half of X tokens from ~mid 2024.
ok but the capabilities are also rising. what point are you trying to make?
That it's not getting cheaper?
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Not true. Bitcoin has continued to rise in cost since its introduction (as in the aggregate cost incurred to run the network).
LLMs will face their own challenges with respect to reducing costs, since self-attention grows quadratically. These are still early days, so there remains a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of optimizations, but all of that becomes negligible in the face of quadratic attention.
> bitcoin
so close! that is a commodity
For Bitcoin that’s by design!
There are plenty of technologies that have not become cheaper, or at least not cheap enough, to go big and change the world. You probably haven't heard of them because obviously they didn't succeed.
cheaper doesnt mean cheap enough to be viable after the bills come due
Supersonic jet engines, rockets to the moon, nuclear power plants, etc. etc. all have become more expensive. Superconductors were discovered in 1911, and we have been making them for as long as we have been making transistors in the 1950s, yet superconductors show no sign of becoming cheaper any time soon.
There have been plenty of technologies in history which do not in fact become cheaper. LLMs are very likely to become such, as I suspect their usefulness will be superseded by cheaper (much cheaper in fact) specialized models.
Concorde?