So the people using the Claude consumer chat products pay for them via usage...

That's not any better. It's actually worse.

I don't understand.

System prompts are part of the software that customers pay to access.

Complaining about that is a bit like complaining that your Netflix subscription includes paying to execute the compiled code that Netflix wrote that serves you video streams from their servers.

Actually there is a difference: If Anthropic deleted a large chunk of that system prompt I guess you might get like a 1% increase in how much Opus 5 you can use via their chat allowance for your paid subscription.

Is that really something worth being frustrated by?

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TZubiri 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cached.

they are the first part of the input and it contains no user dependent variables, so the model is in a known state that it can reuse across all users, it does not need to recompute all that inference

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cubefox 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Unless they are using a linear architecture, the compute cost still scales O(n²) for n tokens, and nemory cost scales O(n).

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TZubiri 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>the compute cost still scales O(n²) for n tokens,

That is never the cost, it's a common misconception.

Cost scales linearly per tokens. Unless you are sending one token at a time and avoiding using the same machine or cache.

Just look at api charges, they are charged by token, not by token squared.

	▲	cubefox 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Which seems to contradict the usual consensus that purely linear architectures are not sufficiently capable and unsuited for frontier models.