Comment by tujux
14 hours ago
Humans: $160k / 9 months = $600/day
AI Software Factory: $4172 / 2 days = $2086/day
This seems unsustainable, unless you're also generating 3x the revenue.
14 hours ago
Humans: $160k / 9 months = $600/day
AI Software Factory: $4172 / 2 days = $2086/day
This seems unsustainable, unless you're also generating 3x the revenue.
I don't get your maths? [1] 160/9 months != 600 for any given number of days a week e.g. 5,6,7 (something between 6 and 7), but where did the 9 come from, is it some kind of adjustment for weekends? Anyway there is also a concept of "fully loaded employee cost".
In any case the way to think of this is not "/day".
The reason is simple. If you buy 1000 barrels of oil, you buy 1000 barrels of oil not 17.4 days of oil. There is now a disconnect between work done and time. Infact you would be sane if you said "that result I can get in 2 days for $4172, if you can get me that same result in 1 hour, I'd pay $8344". See where this is going?
Yes a lot of thought work is now a commodity, and if you want the commodity faster (last minute booking, uber to come quicker etc.) you pay more not less. Value being $/hour is over.
[1] The ? acts as both a question and a regex.
Its an approximate 160k ÷ (9 months x 28 days a month) = 635.
I dont think this is comparable to buying a barrel of oil at all. A software factory like this, I'm assuming is going to be run 24/7.
I get what you're saying, but thats assuming someone's buying their software at the faster pace as well, which we don't know.
I have qualms and disagreements with the whole "software factory" concept, but your math doesn't help the argument. The cost of human labor is more than salary—or even hourly rate, if you're thinking of paying a contractor.
I'm comparing cost per $ of revenue, not labor. And my math is for a scenario assuming a company is running this type of software factory year-round.
Now one could say that the same feature that a customer would've paid $1M for was done in $4k instead of $160k. But buyers are going to demand much more as they see this kind of pace. You'd be able to charge maybe only $10k, because your opportunity cost goes down since you only spent 2 days; you can't keep the same margins that you needed to in order to justify spending 9 months on it. I think it gets very complicated and we're yet to see these economic effects.
Only one of the two trends is downwards.
... Token cost is still heavily subsidized by the frontier labs while they're private companies and raise billions whenever they decide. The downward cost in tokens is unsustainable long term without revolutions training or inference of models.
There is no evidence whatsoever token cost is heavily subsidized.
I run Deepseek v4.1 flash and pay per token.
I get more intelligence and mileage out of few tens of euros on their APIs than I would've got out of Codex+Claude 200$ subscription in June.
If you don't see the downward trend that's a you problem.
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