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Comment by istjohn

5 hours ago

According to Epoch AI:

> The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year. [0]

0. https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

Then why are AI plans still so super expensive, and AI spending going through the roof, while all the subsidies are ending?

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

    AI gets cheaper, people use it everywhere. Google searches, for example. Now we want to crack math problems and spend weeks with unreleased models.

    If you used GPT-2, it'd be incredibly cheap. You basically can't use it for anything and it's simple to serve.

    • You mean if you used a modern LLM of GPT-2-level quality. Vanilla transformers like GPT 2 are ridiculously inefficient in comparison.

  • Because models are only getting better at a rate of 10% per year, people always want the best quality possible. You can get SotA performance from a year ago for a fraction of the cost, but why would you use Opus 4.5 when you can use Opus 5.5?

  • Reddit is full of people complaining how they burn their 200$ sub in half an hour by starting ten Max sub agents. That’s to say, many people just don’t know what they’re doing.

  • Because it's increasingly useful and the thing you are substituting (human time) is much more expensive.

  • Apart from what others said about using more intelligent models instead of cheaper ones, token usage is also increasing a lot. Classic Jevons paradox