> I said for a few years to many a downvote on HN, everyone wants AI, nobody wants to pay the true costs, the AI race will turn into a "race to the bottom" that is, who can give you the most compute for the lowest cost, and still remain profitable?

I keep seeing this but this line of thinking doesn't make any sense. What does it really mean?

There are expensive models that increase the probability of you doing your task under a lower cost. That means you can't use Gemma for coding your new compiler - it would just be overall costlier.

Heavier models are cheaper at more complicated tasks because they use fewer turns and fewer mistakes.

Cheaper models are more likely to be cheap at less complicated tasks. Like if you just ask Gemma "Hi" it would probably be cheaper than asking Opus.

So what does this statement really mean? People don't want to pay the extra for a more costly model? Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!

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bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Why wouldn't you? It reduces your overall cost!

Because real Fable usage starts at $20/month, and has oppressive usage limits even at that (ridiculous) monthly price.

Compared to my $3/month GLM-5.2 subscription, I have never felt like I was leaving capabilities on the table by refusing to cough up $20 for 15 minutes of Fable use per day.

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epiccoleman 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

where are you subbing to GLM-5.2? i've been meaning to try it out and for $3 it's a no-brainer to just load it up and give it a shot.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is the wrong way to look at it. If you have a complicated task , you can solve it for cheaper if you used Fable. It will use fewer turns to achieve the same result.

You can solve it for cheaper if you use GLM but if you are involved in it more, but that defeats the purpose.

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gbalduzzi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The point is that there aren't many complex tasks were fable delivers a significant value increase over cheaper models.

Single prompting a very complex tasks is rare even on frontier models, because it can be done successfully only for specific situations (e.g. you have a very strong verification step the model can iterate on).

Most of my everyday usage is for smaller takes, were you don't really get the benefit of the most expensive models, and my guess is that is the case for the most users

	▲	simianwords 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The point is that there aren't many complex tasks were fable delivers a significant value increase over cheaper models. Strong disagree on this. Any decently complicated task like a refactor is going to be more likely to be solved by Fable than by Gemma 3B or whatever. I have personally tried to use Sonnet over Opus for tasks and Sonnet gets things right sometimes and at other times I wish I had just paid higher. This is the standard pattern I keep seeing and I can have a bet with you that it would stay like this.

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bigyabai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not cheaper if the price of admission is $20 for the first taste. And it's definitely not cheaper to pay per-token versus using my GLM-5.2 quota.

	▲	simianwords 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again this is a resolution problem. Your tasks are small enough that fit into a nice $3 quota. If you are an enterprise or a power user, the right-sizing argument doesn't work. I'm talking about API prices - subscription is a different game.