| ▲ | lionkor 4 hours ago | |
You pay per token, even on subscription models the limit is tokens. If I was valued at 1 trillion dollars, and I was in the hole enough to sink a couple small countries' GDP, maybe I would slowly start to optimize to maximize token usage. I want to sell tokens, how do I sell more tokens? Not by doing the same work in less tokens, that's for sure. This is like if you pay me by the hour and then excitedly tell me that you keep paying 10k a month and it's great. I will most certainly not work faster, in this hypothetical, if you tell me you love spending money because it gives you a dopamine rush. I would probably spend a couple more hours REALLY thinking about the task, maybe writing some docs nobody will read, maybe considering multiple options, doing benchmarks, doing research, and then later maybe ill do the actual task as well. Im not saying these AI companies are scamming us, but the incentives are there and extremely clear. The only thing currently holding it back is that there is some vague kind of competition. | ||
| ▲ | jgil 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | |
Anthropic just said they're going to limit the ability of the new model to assist with building foundational models. The ability to assess the user's goal and tune the inference accordingly is there. So, what methods are there to tell if a provider has their thumb on the scale? Plodding along a longer path to the same goal would burn more tokens without necessarily a decrease in solution quality. Maybe a few more docs. | ||
| ▲ | treyd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
It'd probably still be worth it to make tokens cheaper. Jevons paradox [1] seems to apply here, where making compute cheaper unlocks use cases that were previously priced out, increasing overall demand. | ||