Comment by BearOso
6 days ago
It costs several times what it would cost a small team of engineers, even assuming you gave the engineers more time to do it. I'm guessing (wildly) this was around 0.5M USD in compute time. You do get the result quicker, though.
> I'm guessing (wildly) this was around 0.5M USD in compute time.
That seems like an especially wild guess. If you take e.g. Opus 4.7 prices, and make the assumption that you are consuming roughly $30 for every million tokens of output (this comes from just summing the $25 per million tokens of output and $5 per million tokens of input and assuming that caching basically makes all that work out), and assume an output rate of 80 tokens per second (which seems like a high estimate based on online searching), it would take you about 2411 days of non-stop Opus 4.7 usage to hit 500k in API spend.
The only way you could possibly run that amount of usage in 6 days is if you were running ~400 instances in parallel. From personal experience, that seems crazy high for this project.
I think you are off by at least an order of magnitude (potentially even 2 depending on how the person is managing agents, but I could see something like dozens of agents 24/7, so I'm way less confident in 2, but I think it's still more likely to be closer to 10-20k in API spend).
From the leaked internal prompts, Opus 4.7 vs 4.6 recomputes several times over before returning the result. For heavy use like this, it costs Anthropic far more than you're paying as a consumer. They rely on the light users to offset the whales, and they're still at a significant net loss. If you tried this as an end-user, they might cut you off (though I understand their data centers are underutilized, so that wouldn't be for logistic reasons). Being part of the company and directly sanctioned, the author has unlimited access.
~7x overcompute * ~7x real cost to Anthropic * your 10-20k estimate for consumer use is my thought for actual total cost. If the honeymoon period runs out and they're still in business, this is what everyone will pay.
Half a million is pretty damn cheap for a full rewrite into Rust of a million line of code codebase.
But usually companies are much more careful before even spending that half a million. (And most companies don't have that money sitting around.) They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead, and, more importantly, stick to it.
Being able to afford half a million doesn't mean you do it on a whim, or just throw all of that away if things don't go well.
But what do I know. I am nothing compared to our AI overlords like Anthropic.
> They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead
Perfect, $1mil in salaries to spare the company $500k in spend :)
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