I was in college in the late 1990s/early 2000s and I distinctly remember an econometrics professor state the following:

"As cable TV and Pay Per View came out, there were studies done about how many movies people would watch if given unlimited access to films. The results were bandied about as proof that we should build out all this infrastructure to support this line of business. When the data was further analyzed by statisticians etc, it turned out that people claimed they were going to watch films 10-12 hours a day, every day of the week. Impossible."

I feel like we are in a similar boat here where some people are assuming:

- EVERYONE is going to be using max tokens

- tokens will NEVER get cheaper due to improvements in hardware, software, design, market forces etc etc

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j-bos 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

But isn't it wonderful that they did?

	▲	wizzwizz4 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's vaguely disturbing that people "watch" films 10-12 hours a day. Many of them are using it as a radio, for background noise, without really caring what the program is beyond vague genre, tuning in and out without particular regard to the plot… and yet we have all the cost of transmitting high-resolution video point-to-point. Surely we could just put better stuff on the radio, and accomplish most of the same goals for a far lower price?

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PunchyHamster an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> - EVERYONE is going to be using max tokens

anthropic already hunts down OpenClaw users for using too much on their plan.

I'll give different example: When LED lights started to be more popular, the power usage didn't drop by the amount of power saved

>- tokens will NEVER get cheaper due to improvements in hardware, software, design, market forces etc etc

Well, first, improvements in computing stalled or even rolled back just purely because price of everything compute shot up cos of AI and that will NOT be fixed for a while and ESPECIALLY if AI usage will continue to increase

Second, the token per model might go down in time but better models have more expensive tokens, so we quickly get into spot when:

* price increase in token might not be worth marginal improvement next, better model brings

* more and more models are passing "good enough for the task" threshold so for less and less companies there is any economic sense to pay for the "best" instead of paying deepseek or some other company to run "previous gen" models