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Comment by jagraff | Hacker News Reader

I think the median country GDP is something like $100 Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Models are expensive, but they're not that expensive.

LLM model training costs arise primarily from commodity costs (GPUs and other compute as well as electricity), not locally-provided services, so PPP is not the right statistic to use here. You should use nominal GDP for this instead. According to Wikipedia[0], the median country's nominal GDP (Cyprus) is more like $39B. Still much larger than training costs, but much lower than your PPP GDP number.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

The median country GDP is approximately $48.8 billion, which corresponds to Uganda at position 90 with $48.769 billion.

The largest economy (US) has a GDP of $27.7 trillion.

The smallest economy (Tuvalu) has a GDP of $62.3 million.

The 48 billion number represents the middle point where half of all countries have larger GDPs and half have smaller GDPs.

Well then you have to agree that $48.8 billion IS "something like $100 billion".

Maybe it checks out if you don't use 1 year as your timeframe for GDP but the number of days required for training.

$100 billion is the best estimate around of how much OpenAI took in investment to build ChatGPT.

Maybe for an Australian billion? But in American English it would be $100 million.

In both Australian and American English a billion is 1,000,000,000 (one thousand million).

A top of the line consumer desktop, the Mac Pro, costs $7000. The commonly acknowledged first non-mechanical computer, the ENIAC, cost $400,000, which adjusted for inflation is $6,594,153 (see note). Will AI models follow the same pricing trajectory? Probably not but they no longer cost even close to $100 billion.

Note: 1946 CPI = 19.5, 2025 CPI = 321.465 which makes for an increase of 16.49.

It seems all you did was use this formula:

CPI{2025} / CPI{1946} * Price{1946} = Price{2025}

to obtain the price adjusted for inflation?

That is the only way I was able to arrive at the same number you got: $6,594,153.846. TIL.

> Will AI models follow the same pricing trajectory?

If the article is correct, and this is the best way to make them, their price will explode.

Step 1: Spend hundreds of billions on AI

Step 2: ?

Step 3: Profit.

It’s not enough to have the biggest model, or the best model per dollar spent, you still need to figure out how to make money with it. It’s not clear than vastly increased expenditure will produce a good ROI.

does anyone even have good estimates for model training?

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