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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s about perceived effort. If a job feels easier with AI assistance we’ll demand it. If AI checking a human’s work is more reliable than a human checking AI’s work (it is) that’s what we’ll deploy.

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> AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down.

People said this a year ago, then all the companies admitted they were incinerating cash and had to increase to token pricing. Consumers basically mutinied and managed to push back a bit, but that is the struggle right now - to keep prices from increasing 25+ times, not to see them decrease.

If you're premising this on some future technology like ASICs, even if that works out then we probably shouldn't be spending a trillion dollars on datacenters that it will make obsolete.

People said this a year ago

A year ago Opus 4.1 was $75 per million tokens, and now Opus 4.8 is $25 and Fable is $50.

> AI costs aren't going to stay this high

Why do you feel this way? Are you talking about frontier models from US companies or smaller weight open source models?

From the perspective of US companies, it seems pretty clear they're severely under water and will need some way to become profitable or risk collapse, so how else will they do that or they than jacking up prices or some unknown future miracle advancement?

I could see the argument applied to self-hosted/OSS models tho.

so how else will they do that

By selling more tokens, which by all reasonable accounts are profitable on the margin.

What sources say this besides the LLM companies themselves?

Even if true, they also have to account for training costs or else they'll never break even.

> AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down.

I hear this a lot and it seems to be far too optimistic. Call me skeptical but plan pricing continues to increase with tighter usage constraints. We’re still at the point in time that companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub charge seemingly reasonable prices in order to get people hooked onto AI before raising prices to get their return on investment.

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