> I caution anyone looking at API prices: they dropped the price, but is it actually less expensive?

> Yeah, they dropped the price, but count the number of tokens you're tossing into it and see if it's actually cheaper. It's good for marketing, but the rub is how much you're actually using.

The level of discourse is so horrible now, I don't have words. Are these the ones making predictions on AI bubble?

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InsideOutSanta an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is poorly stated in the podcast, but the underlying point is correct: while cost-per-token is going down, overall token use is way up. This is causing the cost of using LLMs in corporations to skyrocket.

	▲	simianwords 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Do you first agree that not only is the cost-per-token going down, cost per task is going down which obviously encourages people to use it more? If a car company releases a new car with higher mileage, would you suggest that cars are getting costlier?

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empath75 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Of course, the price of tokens going down makes it cheaper. You can now afford to throw millions of tokens at solving a problem that would have been impossible for AI to solve at all a year ago for any price.

People completely lack imagination about this stuff. The main problem right now with AI isn't even AI successfully producing code at a reasonable cost, it's human coordination and review that is the bottleneck.

	▲	HarHarVeryFunny an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think it's both. It's easy to run up a massive bill with AI without much to show for it, which is why token-maxxing has now been replaced by cost-awareness and AI budgeting such as Uber's "max 10% of salary per employee". Cost isn't just token price though - it's (number-of-tokens-used x price-per-token), and there are large differences in token efficiency between different models and harnesses. Increasingly we're seeing benchmark sites focusing on "cost per completed task" as a cost metric, and it's not always the cheapest tokens that win. I agree that ultimately AI/coding cost is just part of the picture - at the end of the day it's about software development cost, which for time being involves humans.

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ac-ciano 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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